Sue Snider: I am Sue Snider, University of Delaware, department of Animal and Food Sciences. We have been talking about microwaving of foods and today, we are going to talk about what you can microwave. Fruits, vegetables and cereals are great microwaved. In fact, they retain their color, they retain their nutritional value and taste great. There are some products like bread and meats that need to be browned and either you can cook them in the microwave and you can cook them safely; they may not be as good a product as you would like. Now there are some products on the market that help. For example, we have a pocket sandwich here and this, to crisp it in the microwave has a special package, so you open up the package, you insert this into this crisping package and then microwave it. So that permits the product to be crisp. There are browning trays that you can use in your microwave to brown meats so that you get that nice brown color and flavor. Probably, the way most people use their microwave is in reheating of products either something that have prepared at home and there is nothing better than having a leftover product the next day for lunch that you reheat in the microwave and in fact, we know that things like microwave reheated meats have less of a warmed over flavor than if you conventionally warm them and then there is a whole host of products that you can find in your frozen food cabinets in the grocery store, but now there are many that are in the refrigerated section and some are even shelf stable. So these are all products that can be microwaved. Again, making sure that you follow the directions very, very carefully. Now one of the things in microwaving that you do have to take care of -- care about is how much food you put in the oven. Microwaves are absorbed and it takes more energy to cook a larger amount of food. It's not quite the twice the amount if I bake two potatoes but it does require more energy.

We have talked about what you can cook in the microwave oven. Next we are going to talk about what you should not cook in the microwave.