6 sausages for dinner!

I had six sausages for dinner today! Can you believe it? For those of know me, six is a lot!

You guessed it, there must be a reason behind it, else firstly, I wouldn't have taken six and secondly, it wouldn't have made it here, unless something happened. And something did happen.

I am not a frequent user of the microwave oven. I actually prefer to go the traditional way of cooking things over the stove, or baking it using a conventional oven. Microwave was just something I took to lately to defrost meat stuff and heat leftover meals in a hurry. Except for the time when I was in Hanoi, where I used it extensively to prepare meals for me. But that was because it wasn't my kitchen and I didn't have much utensil or things to cook and cook with aside from frozen food and instant noodles. Another story altogether.

Back to the six sausages for dinner. How can I right? Had my tummy grew so big? Was my appetite that huge now? Was I starving after performing some heavy duty exercise which burnt off chunks of my energy? Well, nothing of the sorts, actually! My ration went up simply because of my incompetence in using the microwave oven.

I rationed myself to 3 sausages, yes, just three, actually. T-H-R-E-E only. I took out the 3, removed their individual plastic wrapper, set them on a plate and placed them in the microwave. Now I really didn't what was the suitable duration to cook the sausages. So far, I've only defrost things using this microwave. 

There were some basic pictorial instruction on the microwave, which I referred to normally. However, as I said, it was only basic, covering vegetables, beef, fruit and defrost suggestions. Since sausage were made of meat, I concluded that if I should follow anything, it should be the suggestion for the beef. Well, I halved the time since I had only sausages instead of fresh meat, and only three of them. It suggested 9-10 minutes for beef, I set it to 4 minutes.

The smell and the sound that permeated through my tiny kitchen certainly didn't betray anything. I didn't think much except that they were cooking pretty well and that I might as well add some sauce to go with the sausages. So once the sausages were done, I added a scoop of leftover sambal on the plate and adjusted the timer for a further half minute.

When all was done, I took it out, ready to eat. I started to suspect something was amiss with the sausages when I saw how set and crispy the sausages had been. They didn't look hard, just, well, set. Without further ado, I poked one sausage using a fork.  Oh my, what a surprise! The fork wouldn't go through easily! I then took a finger and gave it a poke it, wanting to feel the texture myself. It was definitely not soft. The crispiness wasn't just on the outsides of the sausages, it was crispy the whole way through. My sausages essentially dried up in the microwave! A little longer, and they would have turned paper thin black, I am sure.

The 3 unfortunate sausages were still edible tough, but I didn't have any satisfaction eating them. It was like eating paper shaped into sausages. A slight tingling of the taste of the meat still remained. 10 minutes after finishing my latest dinner creation using sausages, I still felt the unsatisfied craving of having sausages.

So that was how I ended up having 6 sausages for dinner tonight. The second batch came out as plain old cooked sausages from the microwave. I should just kill myself if they too turned into crisp, papery sausages, this time not due to my incompetency but stupidity, right?