My challenge: find a safe & easy technique for cooking bacon in a microwave oven. 

 First, I do some research.  The best recipe I find calls for first cooking raw bacon in its plastic packaging (to get rid of excess moisture) and then shows how to wrap the warmed bacon in newspaper for final crisping in the microwave. 

Whoa! 

To start with, I don't like the idea of cooking in plastic after having read recent articles stating that trace amounts of plastic can leech into the foods they wrap when cooked in the microwave oven.  Then, even though the person who wrote the recipe said that no newsprint was transferred from the newspaper to the bacon after cooking, I don't like the idea of newsprint in direct contact with food, especially during the cooking process. 

So, I improvised. 

I started out with bacon (turkey bacon - less fat) right from the fridge that I wrapped first in a layer of paper towel, then wrapped it in newspaper, put it on microwave safe dinner plate and cooked it in the microwave oven for 5 minutes on HIGH heat.  The bacon popped like popcorn for the first 2 minutes then went silent.  At 4 minutes, I smelled but didn't see any smoke and kept cooking with an eye on the microwave oven until it powered down at 5 minutes.  I popped open the microwave door, released a fat cloud of grey smoke, saw the newspaper smolder and rushed the plate outside where the paper spontaneously burst into flames.  I stamped out the fire with a pot holder, opened the charred paper and saw this...

So far, the experiment's a bust...or is it?   I'll let you know tomorrow.