Everyone needs a ramen food: quick, mindless, cheap, and tasty.
Ramen isn’t a good ramen food for me, though. It’s unhealthy, not very filling, and not particularly vegetarian. So I needed something else to fill the niche. After long searching, I found my answer: microwaving baked potatoes.1 As in, I put a potato in a microwave for 5 minutes, season it, and then eat it.
In case you’ve never done this before, I’ll include a reference recipe at the bottom. I’ll be frank: it’s not as good as baking a potato for 50 minutes in the oven or most foods I cook for myself. But it’s the perfect recipe if I don’t have any leftovers to take to the office: I can just microwave the potatoes while there.
Now, because I find the food bloggers who spend 3000 words to get to a 100 word recipe really annoying, I’ll start with the recipe now.
The recipe
You will need:
- Anywhere between one to two potatoes to bake. If you do more than this, it probably makes sense to split the baking into separate microwave sessions. (But unless you’re really hungry, I’m not sure why you would — this isn’t exactly food to serve to another person.)
- A microwave (duh)
- A fork
- Paper towels or some other way to clean the potatoes
- Paper towels or some other thing to put on the microwave tray.
- (Optional2): Things to put on the potato. I like butter, a can of beans, spinach, and cheese.
Recipe:
- Wash your potatoes by wetting them and then rubbing the skins dry with a paper towel.
- Stab each side of each potato about 5-8 times with a fork. This prevents the potato from exploding in the microwave.
- Put your potatoes on a dry paper towel in the microwave.
- Microwave for 2.5 minutes, then flip over and microwave for another 2 minutes. This timing will vary a bit based on the strength of your microwave and the size of the potatoes, so after this is done, stick your fork into each potato to get a sense of the texture. If it needs more time, it needs more time.
- Once cooked, cut the potatoes open and add your toppings. For me, that’s usually to butter the sides and put beans and spinach on top.
- Enjoy!