If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I have a little specialty in developing and teaching delicious microwavable “mug” recipes for my cooking show, “Cooking With Jessica.” The recipes I develop and teach can be fun and delicious for everyone, and great life skill and adaptive cooking therapy for people with disabilities.
What Makes a Good Mug Recipe?
My cooking show is like a cooking class, so I decided a good mug recipe for my show, and also as an adaptive cooking technique must have four basic criteria:
- Easy and fun to prepare and eat.
- Individual sized portions that can be made in a mug.
- Can be cooked in a microwave.
- Must be delicious!
I would also add that it should be healthy and safe! If you ever attended one of my cooking classes, you know the mug recipes I focus on are both fun to teach and fun to learn. After all, you get the results immediately – just get all the ingredients, prepare them according to my recipe, and then almost instantly you have a great snack or meal.
Given how well-received my mug recipes and classes have been, I thought I would tell everyone about how I sometimes research and develop my recipes.
My Mug Recipe (and Adaptive Cooking) Research and Development Process!
Preliminary Research
Before I started teaching my summer class, I researched on the Internet to find recipes and cooking techniques that could be easy and fun to teach – in one remote learning cooking class, and in under 45 minutes.
My audience was both adults and anyone with any type of disability. Why disabilities? I feel that cooking is one of the most therapeutic techniques for developing life skills, independence, and self-esteem. I even had a cousin, Erma Davis (deceased), who spent her entire career as a cooking rehabilitation therapist at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University. She did not create my interest, but when I learned about her career, it made me even more inspired. What an amazing coincidence! I had developed the idea of cooking therapy for people with disabilities, and my own ancestor was a pioneer in the field!
Anyway, in my research, I learned about DIY mug recipes. Immediately it seemed like a great idea for my class, so I started to do further development of the idea.
Selecting a Few Types of Recipes
I decided to experiment with a bunch of new mug recipes. So I researched different types of foods that might do well for my class and in microwave mug preparation, and then I adapted and developed a few different ideas to try out.
Of course, any good taste testing needs helpers (or victims), and my helpers included my Dad, and Christie. We each picked out 2 of my ideas that we thought could sound tasty in a mug recipe, and then I cooked them with my Christy as my chief assistant.
Cooking, Tasting and Selecting
In all, we selected six different recipes to try out. My criteria for selecting the recipes to further develop for my class included:
- Ease of preparation
- Viability for use in a mug cooking technique
- Adaptability to a remote learning class
- Whether I would enjoy teaching it
- Taste and nutrition. Of course some of them were desserts or sweets, so although nutrition is very important, sometimes you just want a treat!
Here are the results of my initial research:
Avocado Mac and Cheese
This was one of my ideas. I love both avocado and mac and cheese so I thought that this could be a good and nutritious combination of two of my favorite foods. I was also excited to see how cooking pasta in a microwave would go – both as far as taste and texture was concerned, and whether it would even cook enough in the microwave.
It turned out that the macaroni was surprisingly well prepared – thoroughly cooked, and a desirable al dente texture. However, taste was another thing. When I ate it I did not even notice the avocado. I would say that this recipe is good but you can forget about including the avocado, since you do not taste it.
Peanut Butter Cookie
I love peanut butter cookies so I thought that this one would be good to try. Also this one was the one I was looking forward to the most. Unfortunately this one was terrible. I had to cook it twice because it did not even work first time. On my first try, it exploded all over my microwave making a huge mess. No fun! I thought that maybe it was not mixed enough because there was egg and egg can explode so I cleaned my microwave and tried again. This time I mixed the ingredients a lot more thoroughly before I put the mug in the microwave. I turned on the microwave for a minute, but it came out uncooked this time. It still was completely raw. So, I tried it for another 20 seconds. This time the cookie completely burned. What! It was hard to judge how good it was because all I could taste was burnt. I would not recommend making this one. How disappointing.
Microwave Mug Pizza
My Dad picked this recipe, and frankly, this one turned out to be the best one of the experiment. I was surprised about how good it was.Everything cooked perfectly and it tasted just like oven-cooked pizza. It had a lot of flavor in it. It had low-fat cheese, chicken sausage, tomato sauce and flour, all nutritious. I loved it so much that it was a definite candidate for my summer cooking show. Not only that, but I made it a few more times over the summer, just because it was so good.
Brown Rice With Chicken Sausage, Edamame and Pineapple
This one was really good but I feel like it really was not well adapted to microwave mug cooking. The chicken sausage complemented the pineapple very well. However, there was nothing special about this recipe as prepared in a mug, versus just cooking it on the stove or a microwave bowl. You could easily do this in a larger bowl and get a bigger portion to make it a full meal for yourself and family. However, I felt that this one would not be a good candidate for my cooking class.
Cheese and Herb Muffins
This one was Christie’s idea. It came out slightly over cooked. It was not soft and fluffy as a muffin should be, but was a bit hard. One thing I have learned is that you try to bake bread in a microwave, it often comes out hard. However, if you can figure out the perfect amount of cooking time, it might come out okay. Even without a lot of testing, the bottom portion of the muffins came out reasonably well. They also expanded a lot in the cooking process, filling up the entire mugs, which was great and filling. All in all, I decided this recipe was a candidate for further development.
Cinnamon Rolls
Like the muffins, the cinnamon roll also came out a bit overcooked in this experiment. It was not as hard as the muffin though. Of the three taste testers, my dad and myself thought these were good, but Christie did not like them at all, even though they were her idea. She thought they came out too hard. Again, this one was a candidate for further development.
In Conclusion…
In the end, I had come up with one definite idea for my cooking show, and two other candidates. In the next few weeks a worked further on the pizza recipe and actually used it both for my show and for cooking dinner for my family. All in all mug recipes can be a quick and easy way to cook. Some microwave mug recipes are better than others and you have to do some research and development to figure out the best ones. Or, you can just look at the microwave mug recipes I’ve already posted!
Interested in microwave recipes for learning disabled folks