Your microwave is not just for reheating coffee or melting butter. Nathan Myhrvold has called its capabilities “underappreciated” and Mark Bittman wanted to rename it “the whiz-bang steaming oven”. We love it for cooking bacon, and Kennedy’s Favorite Chicken is a microwave reengineered recipe that reduces over an hour of stovetop cooking time to 15 minutes in the microwave (and the results are better, too). And everyday we’re discovering more ways it can produce wonderful food quickly. So how is this all possible?

It’s that time of year when entertaining heats up, and house visits and dinner parties abound. While a lot of what follows is common sense, sometimes we get so busy that we forget. So here are a few simple suggestions that we’ve found help us, and we hope will help you, to be great guests.