How to cook orange lentils in the microwave

It may already be an implicit assumption, but I think that time to cook is probably not as important as how to cook. While the power setting does affect the time to cook, the importance of time is to control how hot the parts of the food get.

As with all cooking, there is a need to control temperature. Running the microwave at less than full power allows time for the heat to be conducted from the hot parts to the cool parts. It is similar to searing vs. sauteeing.

I think that the accuracy of most microwave oven's power settings are good enough (my own testing shows about 10%). I would be more concerned about how I wanted the item cooked. Some examples:

• When I want to reheat things like a thick soup, I run the microwave at full power for a short period of time, stir, and run the microwave again. Stirring the concoction distributes the heat faster than the conduction process.
• When I want to defrost frozen foods (think meat), I use the lowest power setting. This prevents the edges of the food from getting cooked.

My kitchen manager (fine dining restaurant) said that that the only thing a microwave should be used for in a professional kitchen is to heat water.

Microwaving tends to dry out the outside of vegetables, and hurts both texture and flavor. Proper blanching takes about 5 minutes once you have water at a boil, and maintains both the crisp, fresh flavor and full texture. Blanching also tends maintain color better, because the outside of the vegetables heats to the same extent as the inside, and this is doubly true if you use an ice bath to cool vegetables after blanching.

So yes, you are Doing Things Wrong. That said, we all take shortcuts at times, and microwave ovens do work rather well for thawing frozen vegetables. With frozen vegetables you've already lost a lot of the texture, so the microwaving doesn't do much further harm.