How to cook without a microwave

I don't have a working microwave, and everyone wonders, "How on earth do you cook without a microwave?" Funny, isn't it, that people used to cook without them before they were invented, but now they are so common, no one can remember how to cook without one! A few years back, ours broke, and we never got around to fixing it. After a while, I became so accustomed to not having one that I don't even miss it anymore. Most of the time, anyway.

Without further ado... this is how to cook without a microwave:

*Reheating soup, stew or sauce - Pour in pot. Add extra water because it'll probably be thicker after sitting in the fridge. Heat on the stove and stir almost constantly. Unlike in a microwave, this won't explode!

*Softening butter - Method #1 - plan ahead, and remove butter a few hours before use. I rarely use this method... Method #2 - Place butter in a warm spot to soften more quickly. Some places I've used - on the stove top near a burner that's heating, on top of the toaster oven, under the electric frypan (if it has legs), in the dishwasher that's drying, in the sun. Method #3 - Chop butter into chunks. Put in a small frying pan and warm a bit. Add in chunks. My preferred method is whichever I happen to think of first.

*Melting butter - that's much easier than softening butter. Just put it in a small frying and heat.

*Heating rolls, muffins, pancakes, etc - Put in a toaster oven and heat. Or if you have a lot, put them on a tray and heat in the oven at 350.

*Thawing frozen things - Run under hot water for a few minutes to separate frozen item from bag or container. If it is frozen veggies or soup, you can dump it into your soup. You can reheat rice by pouring some oil or butter in an electric skillet and putting the semi-frozen rice in it and stirring, and sometimes chopping the icy chunks (heard of fried rice? There ya go!)

*Thawing frozen ground beef - Either run under hot water for a few minutes or soak in cold water bath (changing the water every 20 minutes.) When you get bored of waiting for it to thaw completely, put the meat in a pot with about 1/2" water. Heat the pot on the stove. Flip the meat over every minute or so, scraping off the browned beef.

*Thawing frozen meat - Run under hot water or do the cold water bath. Chicken or beef is easier to cut when slightly frozen so you don't want it to thaw all the way. It also cooks faster this way. You can also bake frozen chicken or fish in the oven, it just takes a little longer of course. You can put frozen meat in the crockpot. If you're doing a roast, though, you will need to do it on high so that the middle will cook fast enough (and not grow bacteria.)

*Reheating pizza - Put tinfoil on the toaster oven tray. Put pizza on top of that. Put in toaster oven and reheat. For a crispy crust and messy toaster oven, put directly on the rack and reheat.

*Reheating leftovers - Most leftovers can be reheated by frying in a non-stick frying pan. You may need to chop a little or add liquid. You can also put leftovers in a glass baking dish and heat in 350 oven for about 30-40 minutes. Heat leftover meat by pouring gravy over it and heating in a frying pan.

*Boiling water - You can actually put water in a pot on the stove and heat it up that way. And when you are done and you pour the water out, the pot is clean!

*Reheating a plate of leftovers - Sorry, I haven't figured out how to do this yet. This is the one time where the microwave is missed. Instead, we have to reheat everything individually.

I suppose the other question to be asked is "Why would you want to cook without a microwave?" Well, for one thing, it'll cost a chunk of change to fix our built-in, range hood microwave, and truthfully, I can think of other things to spend the money on. There are also those health reasons that haven't ever been necessarily substantiated. There are rumors that a lady died after the blood for her blood transfusion was microwaved and changed the chemical structure of the blood. And there is the science fair project that school kids do where they water two plants - one with tap water and one with microwaved water - and the one water with microwaved water dies. I really don't know if microwaving is a health risk or not, and if I get my microwave fixed, I'll probably use it again. I do know that I probably won't use it as much, though, because I've found many foods do actually taste better and heat just as quickly without a microwave!

So if your microwave ever dies, remember this post and you too can be a non-microwave cooking champion!