Welcome once again to Cooking With Bwog, bringing you the cooking tips you need to eat well using dorm kitchens, a lack of utensils, and a tight budget. This week, Bwog's culinary team brings you tips for using your microwave.

Microwaves are so informal in the cooking world that they often aren't mentioned in cook books. The truth is, most restaurant chefs use them often - at the restaurant Bwog worked at, pasta sauce was made at the beginning of the week and reheated in the microwave when people ordered the dish. Microwaves in America are as pervasive as TVs, and yet people generally use them for only the simplist cooking tasks, such as reheating and cooking popcorn, and even these are often botched by uninformed cooks. Here are a few things you can do to cook with your microwave.

Keep in mind that a microwave operates by emiting microwave radiation. These microwaves are of a certain frequency, which happens to be the frequency that makes water molecules rotate. Physics aside, this means that when you put something in the microwave, the only thing in it that is being heated is the water. If you put something without much moisture in it it will become dehydrated. When you want to reheat Mac and Cheese, for instance, you should always add about a teaspoon of water to the bowl and stir it into the pasta, and when you want to make quesadillas you should wrap the tortillas in wet paper towels to keep them soft.

Recipes, cooking times and more after the jump!