Hi, I'm Jennipher Marshall Jenkinson, chairman of the UK Microwave Technologies Association
and author of the prize-winning cookbook, Microwave Magic: The Art of 21th Century Cooking.
And today, I'm going to show you how to cook vegetables in a microwave.
Now, you can't actually beat the flavour and colour of vegetables that have been cooked
in a microwave oven.
I've got here a selection of vegetables today.
And all I've done is to cut them into small chunks, evenly sized pieces.
And I've rinsed them under cold running water.
Now I've got enough vegetables in this dish here to serve approximately 4 people.
So I've got, as I said, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli.
And I'm going to fill the dish with the washed vegetables, close the lid on the dish and
that's all there's needed.
So, vegetables in here enough for 4 people.
Now, I am going to cook this for approximately 7 minutes in the microwave.
And while that's cooking, I'll tell you a little bit more.
There we are.
Now, there are more nutrients retained in microwave cooked vegetables than by any other
cooking method.
If you think of cooking 4 sauce pans of vegetables on the top of the stove, that will actually
cost you approximately 28 penns in money, and a great deal of the nutrients, the vitamins
and minerals, will be washed away in the vegetable cooking water.
Usually between 60 and 80% of the nutrients will be lost in the cooking water.
But by cooking your vegetables in the microwave, not only are you saving yourself the washing
up and the energy consumption of 4 sauce pans.
You're only cooking the vegetables themselves, in the moisture that's in the food itself.
So you're steaming the vegetables in their own juices, as it were.
And you retain 85% of the vitamins in there.
So, it's a very, very healthy way of cooking and taking up to 5 times less power.
Now, choosing the cooking time, one vegetable, one portion of vegetables, say one portion
of carrots, or one portion of cauliflower will actually take 2 minutes to cook for each
individual person.
Now I've used 4 vegetables in here.
So 2 minutes, times by 4, would give you 8 minutes in total cooking time.
Now I've just taken that slighly under, because overcooked vegetables are horrid.
So it's always best to undercook the vegetables first, make sure they're thoroughly cooked
and you can always add a minute or so of extra cooking time.
But if you've overcooked them, they're ruined.
Let's see what these look like at the end of their 7 minutes cooking time.
Right there's our 7 minutes cooking time, let's have a look what these vegetables look
like.
Ah, absolutely perfect.
The broccoli and the cauliflower.
Just offering a little bit of resistance.
And the carrots here, beautiful.
Al dente as it were.
The colour as you can see of the broccoli, lovely and bright, beautiful colour.
Lots of flavour, lots of nutrients.
What could be easier than cooking all your vegetables in one dish in the microwave, saving
you lots of power, lots of energy and retaining all those lovely vitamins.