A great wall, a great find

For years I have ignored the other half of the large strip shopping mall which houses my thrift superstore, but I wandered over there recently and discovered an Asian supermarket called Great Wall.  It had the potatoes and yams and broccoli I buy at 2/3 to half the price I generally pay, and other things I didn't know about, like Japanese yams, and things I wouldn't know how to cook, like many bins of root vegetables.  Bottles of fish and other sweet or tangy sauces were cheaper too.

Best of all was the fish department, which was like being down at the docks after the boats arrive.  Sea scallops were 9.99, whereas they're generally 12-14.99 where I shop.  I love the much smaller bay scallops, and they were 4.99!  I bought 3/4 lb.

I cooked them up over high heat at the stove using my iron skillet which already had 2 or 3 days worth of oils in it from cooking up a package of raw bratwurst sausages I found in my supermarket's clearance section.  I added some more olive oil with grape seed, threw in a dash or of water spice powder was at hand, jerk chicken and fish, Montreal chicken and pepper and salt.  After 2-3 minutes I poured in a generous dollop of the wine I was sipping, then thickened it by pouring in some Panako seasoned seafood bread crumbs, stirred the mess around and reduced the flame to medium and 2-3 minutes later I had a tasty plateful of scallops, green beans and half a Japanese yam.

There's little time-consuming work and no recipe-reading for cooking in my house.  This meal took about four minutes of work at the stove or counter to put on the table, I put the washed yam in the oven at 350 earlier and the canned green beans in the micro at the 3-minure mark.  All my cooking is based upon my experiences as a young man between semesters for four years working during summers at a busy Nantucket seafood restaurant as a dishwasher then fry cook then broiler man, and in a fancy Aspen restaurant under Austrian owners/operators during winters as a salad tosser then breakfast cook then nighttime saute-chef, and I cook by time and temperature, and sight and touch (with a fork of course).

Shopping for a microwave.

Microwaves. I had a countertop 0.6 cubic foot model that lasted 17 years and handled every task I put to it--heating coffee, warming leftovers, finishing off still-slightly-raw cooked fish, cooking vegetables, baking baking potatoes. Turn the power level to High, turn the minutes dial to the desired number and hit On. If the dish started shrinking or smoking, take it out early, or if it still wasn't hot or cooked, add more minutes. It stopped working and I replaced it a few months ago. With 4 models and counting.
I went to my warehouse club knowing I wanted a 0.6 cubic foot model but their units were measured by dimension, 12 by 18 by 9 inches, or whatever, so rather than driving home to tape measure the darn thing, I bought the smallest unit. It turned out to be too big for my limited counter space (I think I eventually determined it was 1.1 cubic feet--but that helpful size-description was not listed anywhere on the sealed box) so I took it back. At the big box store I bought a 0.7 cubic foot unit with the simplest touchpad control, and trying to conjure up 40 seconds of Hot or 2 minutes of Cook on that thing's confusing sequence of sequential levels on the detailed touchpad was beyond my ability level or level of interest. Back it went as useless.
I found a stripped down floor display microwave unit of a suitable size at a Bed & Bath type store, with an even more simply laid out touchpad control for $36 and it worked fine for two months. I discovered with a little trial and error that once I had set the Cook "button" and, I think, put the Power Level on High, that if I pressed the numbers buttons correctly and hit the On button, the thing would warm the object placed inside for that length of time. It was annoying in that if you left the door open the light stayed on, if you didn't remove the food after cooking it would keep on beeping every two minutes forever, and if you removed the food before its preset time was up, you had to "cook off" the remaining time to get the touchpad clear again because the Reset button was apparently for decorative purposes only. Oh, and you couldn't set anything for less than a minute. So I had a system of cooking on it that devolved into 1-1-1 (71 seconds) for warming liquids or topping things off, 2-2-2 (2 minutes and 22 seconds) for medium duty like "browning" a piece of meat or warming last night's cooked sweet potato and 3-3-3 or 4-4-4 for vegetables or baked potatoes respectively. Hit those numbers, hit On and it performed its assigned task. Until last week. Then it inexplicably refused to respond to any touchpad pokes, it just said Clock. I started pushing all the buttons, I tried 'em all, any and all sequences of numbers and pictures, but no ingenious pattern of pushing Reset button, Arabic number buttons, Set button, pizza picture button, potato picture button, roast picture button, or On button did a thing. It was either broken or crazy. I took to calling it Hal as I evermore forcefully pushed, poked, prodded and pressed buttons in my frustrated desire to cook a broccoli crown in a plastic dish with a little water in it as my fish's 20 minutes time in the oven whiled away. I had to set up a steamer unit on my stovetop to cook the broccoli. Why did I have a microwave at all then if it wasn't going to work? I didn't know if it was broken, or in deep sleep, waiting for the Mother Circuit Board to wake the sleeping sentinel up again.
Grumbling, I contemplated touring Best Buy, Target, Walmart and Home Depot to look at more microwave units to find one that had a simple and understandable control unit that would warm things up and cook simple things like baked potatoes and vegetables. I did look forward with relish, to trash day when I would dump my non-functioning unit into my trash barrel for transport to the scrap heap. My sister listened to my bitter complaints about newfangled, incomprehensible control units that give you indecipherable pictures for tasks instead of old fashioned plain English instructions. Being more savvy and smarter than me, she apparently was googling "Microwave" and "turn knobs" as she spoke with me. "I found a half-cubic foot microwave on Amazon with a turn-knob timer for $60," she said. A light went on in my head. The turn-knob controls! One for power level, one for cooking duration. Of course!
Tomorrow I will take delivery of a small microwave unit from Amazon for under $65 with turn-knob controls. You can't dial in seconds; it only operates on minutes. But when you think it's ready, open the door and see! The light won't stay on. You can push the turn-knob back to zero, it will ding when it's there. No more Reset buttons that apparently have no function. The reviews of the unit were uniformly sterling, like "I ordered this for my 93 year-old grandmother who has a brain tumor and can no longer do simple tasks and this works just fine for her." It sounds perfect to me.
I can't wait for it to arrive so I can set the power knob permanently on High and twist the timer knob to my desired number of minutes for the task at hand and just close the door so it starts. It dings once when it's done, and you can leave the door open.