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Our world is pretty dependent on their microwaves! When I started questioning the safety of my microwave, I thought I’d never be able to do what that divine appliance could do for me without it. It came down to asking the same question for each different situation: What am I trying to do, and is there another way to do it? I’ve experimented and succeeded in many ways.
Here are my top 10 tips for seeking alternatives to microwave use:
- Plan ahead: thaw your meat and other frozen items in the refrigerator. I recommend giving things two full days to thaw. That way you won’t have any surprise frozen centers when you’re ready to cook. If you’re meal planning and making your life easier that way, this shouldn’t be a problem. (Alternative: for ground meats, you can just throw the whole frozen block in the pan and be willing to turn and peel off layers of cooked meat.) In a pinch, you can thaw meats packaged tightly in plastic bags in a sinkful of water – the safety pundits say to use cold water. I’ve cheated with hot water in the past as long as I’m cooking up the meat immediately. This is much quicker (and safer, with cold water) than just leaving things on the countertop to thaw.
- Use your teapot for boiling water. It is sometimes just as quick as the microwave and stays hot longer!
- Steam or roast your veggies.
- Use a pot to reheat: soups, stews, casseroles (that won’t be messed up by stirring), pasta with sauce, etc. Just add a little bit of water or broth (or cubes of broth) in the pot to reduce sticking.
- Use a toaster oven to reheat: store your leftovers in glass containers and pop them right into the toaster oven. You can even reheat multiple servings of different foods this way. I stick with 350 degrees, and it takes anywhere from 5-30 minutes to reheat foods, depending on how dense or deep the food is in the container. Cover items that might brown on top with a bit of tinfoil (reuse it every time!). Do use a hot pad on the table for single serving dishes right out of the oven.
Note: For anything that could possibly be heated in a pot or pan, the stove is immeasurably quicker than the toaster oven or large oven, so you want to make your choices based on time available. Next week I’ll share with you my tips for time management with lunch preparation.
- More toaster oven magic: put pizza, hamburgs, tacos…any single item leftovers on a tray in the toaster oven. Again, you can reheat different stuff at the same time. You can even do a little plop of beans and rice or a chunk of lasagna on the tray.
Just one example of a leftovers night at our house. You can see baby's food in a glass dish, pizza, a piece of fish, and a baked potato. Baby's food comes out in 3 minutes, pizza a few minutes later, and the baked potato in about 15 minutes.
No toaster oven? You can do all that in a regular oven as well, of course! Maybe even leftovers for a family of eight…see the comments at this post.
- Reheat baby food/thaw food cubes: Use a glass dish and one cycle of “toast” (two or more for frozen cubes) will usually do it! This way you don’t have to set a timer, which is nice. Baby doesn’t need food very hot, anyway!
I also use the “toast” function for small things like muffins, pancakes, and thin tacos, as well as leftovers for my son who doesn’t like things too hot. It’s nice to be able to walk away and know I’m not going to let something burn if I forget to set don’t hear the timer.
- Pop your popcorn on the stovetop! I felt silly when my friend told me how yummy and easy this is. I had never considered that it was possible! Just melt some fat (butter, olive oil, coconut oil) in a pot and put one kernel in. When it pops, add more kernels (up to a ½ cup) in a single layer and put the lid on. If you have a glass lid and kids to watch the action, this is a really fun activity! You can tell when it’s done just like in the mic: when the popping noise gets a few seconds apart, pull the pot off the heat quickly. Pour popcorn into a bowl, and you can use the same pot to melt some butter to drizzle on top if you’d like. Mmmmm…
Another option is to buy a popper; I just found one at a garage sale for a buck, and it works great! It’s 30 years old, which is a little scary, and it shot a few kernels across the room, but who doesn’t like a little daring and adventure in the kitchen?
- Melt butter, cheese or chocolate for recipes: Either in a pan with lots of stirring, or even better, in a small pot that is nestled in a larger pot filled with water. I call this the poor man’s double boiler, and it’s great because it will prevent your chocolate or cheese from burning. (The large pot does NOT count as a dirty dish; just dump the water and air dry!)
- Another double boiler fake-out: if you have leftover soup or sauce frozen in a glass jar (I like using spaghetti sauce jars – they’re free and just the right amount for my little family of 3 ½ eaters), you can put it in a pot of water and heat it up until you can pour out the soup into the pot (after you empty the water, of course!).
If you can utilize even one of these tips to avoid the microwave, go over to this post and sign up for “Mind the Microwave in May”! It’s fun to count how many minutes you save and enter them in the sidebar widget. Why avoid the microwave? Read one reason here. Learn how Mind the Microwave started here.
Come back later this week for Surprising Benefits of Avoiding the Microwave!
Read more Kitchen Tips at Tammy’s Recipes.
Check out another blogger’s Reheat-Without-Microwaving Tips here.
Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.
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Recipe Connections:
- Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes
- Potato Salad with the Kids
- Homemade Refried Beans
- The Best Scrambled Eggs Ever
- Happy Uses for Tomatoes
- Crockpot Tuscan Beef Stew
Hungry for more? Related posts:
A few days after reading your posts about the microwave, ours broke down(the plate stopped rotating). We decided not to buy one anymore and just used the other appliances we have. We also have that old popcorn pumper
I love it when the popcorn start spinning and flying around the kitchen…just kidding!
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Very good info. I have a close friend and now my healer telling me to stop microwaving … sigh. I needed to read this today. Thanks!
Viveca
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Katie Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Viveca, I’m so glad to be of help!
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My MIL doesn’t own a microwave and never has, and I’m always amazed at how she is still able to cook!
I would love to ditch our microwave to recover some precious counter space, so I may see how it goes and May and re-evaluate how much it is needed at the end of the month. Thanks for the great tips!
PS: Stove-top popcorn is one of my favorites–my grandma always did it that way and it has such a natural flavor to it. Grandma would throw in a handful of peanuts, too, and it was really good!
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Katie Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Rachel, Oooo, peanuts. I love it!
It is funny how we have come to consider the mic as a standard kitchen appliance. My mom was telling me that we got our first one when I was 8. I said, “What did you do before that?!”
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I’m with you on cutting back on the microwave. Good post. I’ve started cooking popcorn on the stovetop and it tastes so much better!
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We have lived over 3 years with no microwave. It took some getting used to at first, but then it was really no problem at all. I sure would have been helped by your tips when we stopped using the microwave!
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Katie Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Laryssa, Well done! Any tips to add for us?
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Great tips! I’d love to give our microwave the boot and gain some more counter space.
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Very interesting! I just found your blog and love it. I didn’t know that microwaves are not healthy, thanks! It does make sense.
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What great tips. We recently moved and our household goods weren’t elivered for several weeks. We had to learn to live without the microwave. It took a little getting used to, but now that our things have arrived, I find we almost never use it. Your ideas and suggestions might be just the thing to help us get rid of it for good. I’ll be back again to read the benefits of avoiding the microwave!
Also, your tip for freezing soup in spaghetti sauce jars is brilliant! I can’t wait to use this tip. Thanks so much!
Lori
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Twitter: sarahsmusings
// May 12, 2009 at 7:11 pm
I rarely use the microwave, but these are great tips for when I DO use it (or did?) Mostly I just used it for reheating leftovers, and the occasional defrosting of baby food cubes or quick quesadillas for Lloyd’s lunch. Maybe a few times a week, tops?
I’m hoping to get some more glass and ceramic dishes for leftovers to help make the transition to a toaster oven in the future a bit easier!
Best,
Sarah
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Katie Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Check those garage sales this time of year! The best finds are dishes with glass lids, because those are getting hard to find in stores anymore. Best of luck!
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We ditched our microwave this winter to gain counterspace, and as a way of preparing to live in Guinea for 7 weeks. I am so glad we did! One thing I picked up in Guinea is cooking with a small pressure cooker – it helps a lot with unthawed meat. I needed some beef chunks on Sunday, and did a frozen sirloin steak in the pressure cooker in about 20 minutes cook time…it was falling apart it was so tender.
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Link Appeal - May 19, 2009: GNOWFGLINS™ // Jun 4, 2009 at 2:12 pm
[...] those sneaky liver tips) to reduce microwave usage during the month of May. She’s also put up 10 tips for avoiding the microwave and how to reheat leftovers withOUT the microwave. (Here are my tips for how to reheat foods [...]
I just recently came across your blog, and am so grateful for the thorough, well-balanced information I find here! This series on microwaves has been very helpful, as it’s something I’ve been considering for a while. I have a question regarding butter, though. The package says to “keep refridgerated” but this leaves me with butter that is virtually unspreadable on toast, muffins, etc. I generally put the butter in the microwave to soften it. I hate how often I microwave our butter, but I’m not sure of an alternative. And I don’t own a toaster oven. Any suggestions?
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Katie Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Kristin,
Happy to have you along for the ride!
Butter can hang out on your counter just fine, as long as you get through a stick in less than, say, a month. (?) I’ve only had butter go rancid once, and it was out of the fridge for a LOOOOONG time. (btw, you’ll KNOW if it goes bad. Yikes.) Just leave it in a butter dish out of the fridge. Toaster ovens are super helpful for avoiding the microwave, but nothing you can’t do in a big oven…it just seems like a big commitment to turn on the real oven for one thing. I still think heating *most* things is faster in a pot on the stove, esp. if you have a gas range. Best of luck! Katie
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Kristin Reply:
July 22nd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Thanks for the quick reply! That’s very helpful. I’m so new to all of this!
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Thanks for this great article – it helped me get up the momentum, at long last, to unplug the microwave and take it off the counter.
A few months ago I heard that bone broth, in particular, undergoes grievous structural protein changes in the microwave. As I’ve been making more and more things with broth, I adjusted to the minor inconvenience of reheating food on my stove. Why spend hours simmering free-range goodness only to Frankenfood it later? So I mostly only was using it for random things like reheating coffee.
But the main reason to throw out the nukeolator was that the mica shield (stopping radioactive rays?!) had been damaged a long time ago, and had a big hole in it! I don’t even want to think about what nasty things I absorbed from using it “unshielded” for months.
It’s headed for the recycling center this weekend – thanks!
You tip about heating several little bites in a toaster oven was good. (Isn’t the toaster oven fantastic? You can bake muffins in summer without making your kitchen an inferno, or roast a handful of green beans whenever the mood strikes you. Now that’s an indispensable appliance!)
You can also warm up several kinds of food separately in a large pan, with a sprinkling of water – although there will be a little bit of intermingling. It works well for Thanksgiving leftovers and so forth.
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Katie Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Maizy,
Katie
Congratulations on your un-acquirement!
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