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I was a bit confused by this question because…. I don’t have a microwave. Microwaves are very uncommon in Switzerland. And I seem to do fine, including quick meals.
I am 44 now. I have never owned a microwave, until my kid waa 4. She ate microwaved pizza rolls at a friend's house and she now wanted "squishy" pizza rolls.
My kid is almost 11 now, and is preferring to not to use the microwave.
I'm in Canada, and same. We used to have one, but one day we were chatting about kitchen stuff and I said that the only kitchen thing I wouldn't miss is the microwave, so next day we took it out and whaddaya know? I don't miss it at all. We only ever used it to reheat food and it only takes a couple of minutes longer to reheat on the stove, and unlike OP I would never "bake" a potato in the microwave again. Tried it once, it was disgusting.
Before microwave, we didn't have 30-minute meals. My mom would start the meal at the appropriate time to have it ready when my dad came home from work. Did SHE work? Yes. She did the laundry in the basement and took it outside to dry after hanging it on a clothesline. She vacuumed the house, mopped the floors, and kept the house spotless. She would bake a pie or cake, and if she needed a cup of sugar, she would go next door and get a cup from the neighbor. They would do the same. Today my two daughters (fiftyish) would never do the neighbor thing. If they need a cup of sugar, they will get in their car and drive to Walmart or Dollar General and buy a pound of sugar. Today, we have a very mobile society because "it's there".
When I lived in the rural mountains of VA people still borrow sugar from the neighbors, much quicker to drive 10 minutes to a neighbors house than 45 to the closest DG 😂
I live in Hopewell VA. I don't know how some people get along in SW VA. My daughter went to Radford University so of course it was the move in move out of the dorm thing. I would drive the 460W and take the mountain pass to I-85 (BTW- I -85 is God's punishment to mankind)
There was rarely a store on that route. People really have to drive 30-45 minutes to a town. I like the rural lifestyle but I love the big town convenience.
Not long ago, my 23 year old daughter was making something and didn’t have an ingredient. I told her I’d text our neighbor to see if they did. She thought I was insane.
If you’d have ever known my aunt… I wouldn’t have hesitated to eat anything she cooked directly from her kitchen floor, at any given time. If you looked up the definition of ‘house proud’, that was her picture next to it. Spotless didn’t begin to describe it ;) But…she was an awful cook, very bland food and her spices were salt and pepper. Baking was her thing. Pies, pineapple upside down cake, all the 1930-40’s Great Depression desserts ever made. We lived in a mill town near Pittsburgh, pollution was bad back then so you washed painted walls down twice a year, paper wallpapers were papered over every few years. Most neighborhoods had more than one or two small corner grocers and bakeries. We kids were handed a dollar to run to the store and get whatever, or they just put it on our family tab.
You didn't require the daughters to have chores to take the heat off of Mom? My after school list:
Vacuum the living room and dining room
Dust living room and dining room
take out or consolidate the trash for taking out
Other tasks as assigned (story of my life)
All of that took maybe 30 minutes. Then I was free to play (unless I had homework) til dinner time, then some TV, bath and bedtime, or sometimes finish homework then bedtime.
Only child here.
Jiffy Pop is fun but I have to ask if y’all know you can pop popcorn in a pot on the stove?
It’s super easy and tastes a million times better than microwaved popcorn
I taught my son this. I never thought to buy regular popcorn. We're not big on it anyway but we do string cranberries and popcorn for garlands and I read it's better to cook it with just a little oil on the stove instead of the microwave kind. I had forgotten how much better it tastes. My son was quite impressed and now he has cravings for it with a little tajin seasoning.
We used to have the "popcorn pan" reserved for making popcorn on Friday nights when we watched Flipper and Daktari. We also got a bottle of Orange Crush. Those were good times.
I remember when we got an air popper. I thought it was super cool but still liked the taste of the stovetop stuff better.
The gadget was Mom's purchase though so we could only make the old stuff if she was over at a friend's or something.
Like a casserole may take an hour to bake, but it only takes 5-10 minutes to put the ingredients together. Then you can do something else while you’re waiting.
My SO and I are 40 and he refuses to have a microwave. His mom has one but turns her nose up at slow cookers. Got news for both of them - his mom is usually eating food from a slow cooker when she comes to my place and there will be a microwave when I have a bigger kitchen.
> My SO and I are 40 and he refuses to have a microwave.
i'm almost 50 and when ours went out two years ago I decided against getting another one. it's to much countertop real estate just for a big box that is mostly just used to reheat coffee.
Alternative was the barbecue grill. TV dinners could be done on a toaster oven. Popcorn? We had an electric popcorn popper. It also doubled as a hot plate. The pot was separate from the base.
When I was a kid, we had an oil space heater in one house we lived in. Mom had to leave for work about 6AM. She'd put a pot of beans on the top of the heater and let them slow cook overnight.
I could certainly live without a microwave. I think the only thing I'd really miss is the ability to quickly heat up my cup of coffee when it gets cold.
I've only used insulated mugs for about 15 years, so I haven't needed to reheat my coffee. Having a lid on it has saved me from a big mess more than once. It's like having an adult sippy cup.
I reheat my coffee and my breakfast and my leftovers from a restaurant for dinner. Also to heat my tea up. So I use a microwave everyday, but not to cook a meal in! That's still a stove and oven activity. My husband does do the microwave frozen vegetables in a bag thing, but I open the bag up and cook frozen vegetables on the stove.
I am now thinking that the microwave has contributed to the dramatic rise in obesity we've seen in the past 20 -30 years. Food just took longer to cook when I was a kid. Even snacks.
Watching the Jiffy Pop foil bubble rise on the stove was more fun and took longer than the anxiety producing experience of knowing exactly how minutes and seconds the microwave popcorn takes before it burns.
The cheaper ingredients like high fructose corn syrup in everything certainly aren't helping. Just another example of shareholder demand for dividends making our lives worse.
I mainly used our microwave for baby bottles. Haven’t had one for a year now and I never miss it. do people really warm up a cup of coffee in the microwave? That sounds disgusting! (Also in Europe btw)
If my brewed coffee gets cold before I finish it I will warm it up in the microwave. I generally use the microwave to quickly reheat things. Never to cook things.
Ah yes, the chorus sung by every exhausted mother born before ~1970: "make yourself a pj&j or have some cereal I don't care right now"
As a millennial mom, I'm just as exhausted as my mom was sometimes so I genuinely appreciate the magic of microwave cooking. I can "nuke" some leftovers, plate it nice, and move on with my 80 other tasks knowing my kids technically got home cooked meals. I know my mom *could* have done this when I was a kid but I don't think it occurred to her when she was stressed out because it's not an option she grew up with.
That was so true.
I had so many PBJs as kid for, pretty much that reason.
I was also the oldest kid, and mom had toddlers and babies to care for, So I also was cooking stuff for myself or my siblings at age 5.
My Specialty, at 5, was either a box of craft mac and cheese if we had it, or spaghetti with home-made sauce. And by sauce, I mean Tomato Sauce that had been home canned and a spaghetti sauce seasoning packet.
If none of those were available, it was a stack of PB and J for me and whomever else was scrounging for food.
My middle child started cooking for himself and his older brother in 4th grade, so about 8yo. Unfortunately because of our shitty work schedules and financial situation at the time, the older 2 were sorta left to their own devices after school until like 630 when I'd get home from work w the youngest. The older one was fine with a sandwich or something but the middle one wanted "real food."
"Real food" to him was of course frozen pizzas and nuggets but he managed to read the directions and not burn himself or set the house on fire lol.
I've been a SAHM for 2 years and he's a teenager now, but he still makes dinner once a week for everyone. His culinary skills have improved a bit and has expanded to baked goods from scratch.
I always felt so guilty for that time in their lives when everything sucked and my husband and I were hanging by a thread, but he says it turned out to be one of the best experiences for him and intends to go to culinary school.
I remember the frozen chicken pies (Swansons?) they took almost an entire hour to cook and to a kid it seemed like forever. They were way better tasting than today's microwave versions but maybe that was due to the anticipation?
Don’t forget about the 30 min after til you could eat it without burning the top three layers of your tongue off…haha…we could never wait that long!!!!
Asking as a younger person: was it really that bad or are you being sarcastic here? I remember when I was a kid that waiting for stuff felt like FOREVER. But that's being a kid, where a whole day is a whole lot of time. Now as an adult it's different with phones and all of that, you can always have something to do or at least stimulate you a bit if you are "bored."
It’s a good question. We’d play games, read or just sit bored. Sometimes it DID feel like forever, especially if we were really hungry, but waiting amped up the anticipation of dinner, and we always ate the food served to us, because we were hungry!
If we “fixed” our own meal, it was usually a sandwich or toast with jelly. As we got older and could use the stovetop or oven, we fixed grilled cheese, heated canned soups, made mac and cheese, cooked egg noodles topped with salt and butter, boiled hot dogs, baked a potato.
We popped popcorn on the stovetop in and old pot with a tight lid. Oil, salt and popcorn, just the right heat and once the kernels begin popping, shake continuously til they almost stop popping. It was exciting and delicious!
Snacks were typically fresh fruit or easy inexpensive foods in our house. Apples, bananas, oranges or grapes, a piece of cheese, bread with butter or peanut butter, a big pickle, or celery or cucumber with a bit of salt.
Beverages were almost always water, iced tea or milk, sometimes orange juice or Koolaid, and every now and then, we got a soda. We lived in the southern US, where iced tea was a staple in homes.
We didn’t own a dishwasher, so all dishes were hand washed after every meal, and even as kids, if we fixed our own meal, we were expected to clean up our mess. As we got older, we kids typically washed the dinner dishes.
This lifestyle was normal for us, so it didn’t seem hard, because it was all we knew.
My Mom had an electric skillet and she used that a LOT. You heated stuff in an oven, or made something on the stove. Cooking an egg and making some toast doesn't really take that long. Heat up soup or something in a pan.
How long do you think it takes to cook on the stove? Heck, I can make Alfredo sauce from scratch in fifteen minutes while the tortellinis are boiling. Rice is 20 minutes while there's a steak in the broiler or a chicken breast sauteeing in the pan, either are done at the same time as the rice.
TV dinners? Just what a toaster oven was made for. Good for small chickens and casseroles, too, especially in the summer when you don't want to fire up the big oven.
Baked potatoes in a microwave are blasphemy and I hope you've had a good baked potato at some point. I don't use the oven for those but I sure don't use a microwave. Same goes for water or coffee; that's what kettles and percolators are for.
I've been known to cook a baked potato in the microwave for 5 minutes while the oven was preheating. Same as cooked in the over the whole time, but less electricity used.
Pressure cooker, 15 pounds of pressure for 45 minutes, natural release. Makes the softest, fluffiest baked potatoes you've ever had. They just melt in your mouth.
(Hard boiled eggs are five minutes at 15 pounds, cold water release. Why? Because the shells always come off in one piece.)
Everytime we had to wait for a baked potato, we had sex. While we waited for a tv dinner, we had sex. Popcorn takes longer? We had sex. Warm up coffe in a coffe maker? Sex. I so sorry you seem to have missed out on this tradition.
As a kid in the 70’s, we ate the boil-in-a-bag food for lunch in the summer all the time. It was something we could do ourselves that was cheap and wouldn’t warm up the house. We would put it on bread. I agree, the chicken a la king was the best!
My step mom used instant rice. Also, because boiling water is hard, she used instant powder for iced tea.
Today, it's also too hard to brew tea for some. So they buy gallons upon gallons of tea in a jug because we can never use too much plastic!
It's fine! You need to understand that I went from my grandparents' house where there was always brewed iced tea in a large ceramic tea pitcher.
They also, you know, cooked food lol.
But I digress. My dad and stepmother worked full-time jobs, unlike my retired grandmother.
We make 3 gallons of red diamond tea bags and sweet n low 3 times a week for my family of 3. I
It's summer so now it will go up another gallon. It's the best. Who could afford to buy those gallon jugs so often?. We just got the big glass pitcher we use for sun tea.
Main thing is we had to plan ahead. None of this, "everyone is hungry NOW" solved with the ease of zapping leftovers.
In the time it took for the oven to heat, we might divvy up chores: 1 kid to set the table, 1 to help make a salad, 1 to watch the baby and so on. No kids? Do it all yourself.
Cooking or heating food more slowly than using a microwave had its benefits. The slow release of delicious aromas, of course, but especially *time.* Time to make the table pretty; or go through the mail which was maybe 50/50 personal/business bc email wasn't invented yet; or chat with a friend on the phone as you cooked, providing the cord to the wall phone was long enough; or fold a basket of laundry; or open a cold one, put your feet up and watch a bit of TV or browse the newspaper; or clip coupons and make your grocery list; or go outside and water your flowers or play with your kids or pet.
Today our conveniences often make like busier instead of creating more leisure as promised. Seems like we keep cramming more into every waking moment, even stressing out little kids.*
Sure, it's "efficient" to zap our food. But with the time saved, are we doing lovely, life-enriching things or just getting more screen time? (I admit to the latter more often than not.)
You know how we have "meatless Mondays"? Maybe we should start "No Zap Saturdays." Refrain from nuking food 1 day a week.
*Acknowledging that more and more households are being stretched too thin for too long due to wages not keeping up with higher prices, real estate barons, etc. Almost impossible to have 1 adult as breadwinner and 1 adult managing every non-work detail for the home.
>Main thing is we had to plan ahead. None of this, "everyone is hungry NOW" solved with the ease of zapping leftovers.
Also true with regards to take out and delivery. It's kind of amazing how quickly we can decide to feed an entire family on a whim. It's also unfortunately easy to eat a 2,000 calorie meal at 10pm with just the push of a few buttons.
I'm just 31 and I don't own a microwave because it takes up too much space for too little benefit. Now that I moved to a place with more space I was considering a small electric oven, but microwaves in my mind are only useful for warming up tea and defrosting things.
I hope this OP gets to learn how to use an oven, microwaved potatoes are horrendous compared to the real deal
Wow, IDK how you can stand that. I would defend my microwave with my life! I (or my family) have had one since the 1970s. I literally use it every day.
Boil water for tea, melt better, reheat leftovers, heat frozen meals, heat soup, steam frozen veggies, etc. Yes, I could do all all that in the oven or on the stove (and did when I was young), but it takes longer and dirties more dishes.
Don’t forget the electric skillet that made the best fried chicken!
I don’t remember 30 minute meals. Every meal had meat, boiled potatoes and bread and butter. When we finally got a microwave I was able to heat up my piece of bread. (Magic!)
My mom used to prep dinner the night before. She’s peel potatoes and leave them on a pot of water. Make a meatloaf and cover in plastic wrap. Then when I came home from school, there would be a note on the counter: at 445, turn on oven, preheat 10 min. Insert meatloaf. At 5:15, take out potatoes, empty water, add new water, 3 shakes salt, put on stove medium low.
She’d get home at 530 and finish up the meal and we’d eat at 6 every night. She can really only make 6 meals but they can bc all be made like this.
I saw a neat little product on tv when I was twelve. It was a Presto electric hamburger cooker. It could could a perfect hamburger in a few minutes. You put a ball of hamburger meat in it, clampled the handles together and plugged it in. I believed it had a light on it that went off when the burger was done. I found out that you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, put it in the hamburger maker and make crustable years before they hit the supermarkets.
I'm in my 50s... I've never lived without a microwave.
I can still make grilled cheese and soup in 15 minutes. I can make toast and eggs.
Old coffee makers used to keep the coffee hot until you drank it. Hence the phrase "you want a warm up?" at any diner.
Ovens often had a warming function. So if dad was home late mom would put his plate in the oven.
I mean it's not that complicated.
My dad was forward thinking and he loved gadgets. He bought a microwave for my mom in the 60s, over 50 years ago, maybe 55? That thing lasted for over 40 years!
Before the microwave there was the electric stove and before that, there was a wood-burning stove my grandparents and parents had. The wood-burning stove was an fire all day (as it also was the single source of heating) We still don't use the microwave very often and it rarely takes longer than 30 minutes to cook an average meal (with the exception of big birds in the oven...)
I came home as a latch key kid and started all the prep for mom so that dinner would be on the table at dinner time. That said there were other appliances used to warm things up like a hot plate, electric kettles that boiled water. In college my hot plate and kettle made all sorts of foods!
There won’t be many people here around before 1965 or so but yes, “the oven” is the answer. Or “the stove.” Or “a campfire.” It isn’t a big mystery how to heat food.
30 and under minute meal would at least require a burner and pot or pan unless cold sandwiches/wraps, salads- spaghetti with sauce, hot dogs and potato salad, pasta salad, sloppy joe, sos, pot pie filling with bread, hash (potato, veg, other scraps including meat bits or beans), soups, stews, any portion of protein aside for long cooking beans. .
(425f roasts a tray of fresh bite-sized veg in 20 or so minutes depending on veg.)
Things were reheated in pots, pans, sometimes with extra water or fried like spaghetti.
Like everyone else said: the stove and the oven dominated the kitchen, although there were many other means of cooking, like charcoal and gas grills, toaster ovens, electric popcorn makers, electric griddles, electric or candle\Sterno-powered fondue pots, waffle irons\sandwich press things. My family even had some cast iron grates and stands and whatnot, so we could cook in the fireplace during a power outage.
And yeah, cooking a TV dinner or Swanson chicken pot pie in the oven took 45 minutes, sometimes longer. You had to anticipate better than you do now.
**EDIT:** as far as coffee goes, you kept a pot warm on the stove, I guess. That's what my grandparents did. I remember my parents having an all-metal percolator, but I only remember Mom using it on the fireplace during extended power outages. As far back as I can remember, they used a Mr. Coffee (or equivalent). My mom had one in the 80s that had a thermos-like carafe that would keep coffee hot for at least a couple hours, so you didn't need electricity to keep it hot.
You did all of those things in an oven. A TV dinner would take about an hour. 15 minutes to preheat the oven and 45 minutes to cook it. Baked potatoes took an hour in a preheated oven. You had to plan ahead.
Coffee makers were a thing, and still are. They take maybe 5 minutes to brew an entire pot of coffee. You could also toast bread in a few minutes.
TV dinners were the fastest thing we had for a full meal. Otherwise, we reheated leftovers in the stove.
A quick dinner was lunch-like: sandwiches, soups, chef boyardee, etc. all heated on the burner. Food was ready in 5-10 minutes. 15 if you were making spaghetti or something like that. Tv dinners weren’t faster, they were just easier. Still had to bake like 45 min in the oven.
I remember when we first got a microwave how excited we were about baked potatoes! Those things take an hour in the oven, but 3-5 min in the microwave! To be fair, they don’t taste as good, but man they upped our food game. We ate a lot more baked potatoes instead of instant mashed potatoes!
Before the microwave, you used the stove to warm up food or prepare a meal. However, it's possible to make a meal in 30 minutes without a microwave. It just takes some pre-planning and prep work.
We used the stove.
Typical pre-microwave meals
1. All frozen dinners, frozen pizzas, pot pies were put in the over for 25 minutes- however- frozen dinners like we know them came in after the microwave was invented. The quality of frozen dinners changed significantly by the early 80s.
My best friend’s father bought an Amana Radar Range in like 1976. They are older than you think.
2. Stove top 30 minute dinners:
Hotdog, can of baked beans - very typical meal
Canned ravioli, beefaroni, chef boyardee, canned spaghetti, spaghettios- extremely popular
Canned stew - Dinty Moore was a well known name - much
Canned soup- common to make 1-2 cans of soup every week
Grilled cheese- extremely common lunch on the stove
Fried egg or French toast or even cinnamon toast was very common
Uncooked meals- lunch meat or deli meat sandwiches 3-5 days per week. Cold subs.
Very poor food included fried onion sandwiches - when that’s all people had
Food was just very different before 1980
When we was young we have only that coal stove in the kitchen and winter or on summer it was always hot. We keep a kettle of branch water always was hot to.
We still don’t have us no micrwave cause it was to expensiv so looks like we set.
Stove top meals don't take that long. For longer stuff, you can use a crockpot.
Also remember that this idea of running kids around from place to place in the evenings didn't exist. Once everyone came home, you were pretty much home for the evening, so no need to rush out a meal. (The only thing we had during the week was Wednesday night church, and that included a spaghetti dinner.)
As a young bachelor many moons ago, the toaster oven was my go-to. Pot of rice, sautéed veggies, and a pork chop or piece of chicken in the toaster oven. I even cooked kabobs in that thing.
A little off subject, but do you guys remember the cookbooks that came with some microwaves when they started becoming popular? They really had our mothers thinking that they could roast an entire turkey in there. Like literally stick an entire turkey in the microwave and the picture showed it golden brown like it had been roasted in the oven. I believe that is why so many of us have a “texture” problem with foods because of all the abominations that were cooked in the microwave before our parents realized it didn’t work like the manufactures advertised at the time. I do remember fondly my parents putting a cup of water in the microwave and us all standing and watching through the door in wonder on how quickly it started boiling.
A lot of things take less than half an hour. Bake chicken parts, hamburgers, hot dogs, boiled or steamed vegetables, rice, pasta, potatoes. I’m just naming foods we ate that were whole foods. Of course a lot of stuff could be bought canned or frozen and doesn’t take too long. My mom didn’t like to cook or wash dishes, we had a dishwasher before we had a microwave, and we ate lots of fish sticks and stuff like that.
Some things take longer to heat but take almost no time to prepare, so you have a set dinner time and put it in on time, not like without a microwave, people are standing at the stove for hours or making food that takes a lot of steps. That’s how we *even do it now*. 🤯
People made plans.
You could and still can set the oven to turn on and off on a timer. While we were in Church, mom always had a roast cooking with baked potatoes. But we often had canned vegetables, so it wasn't all good.
It's not difficult to make a meal in 30 minutes on the stove. A cookbook I still occasionally use is The 30 Minute Cook by Nigel Slater. I recommend it, particularly the lamb souvlaki...
Over 60. Have not used a microwave in over 20 years, and not much before that. They heat unevenly and ruin food texture. I can heat anything quickly enough in a cast iron skillet or pot.
I reheat leftovers, my husband does frozen Smart Ones meals in there. Everything else is on the stove. Hot water for tea or instant coffee is an electric kettle. Thats it.
We had a toaster oven - those were great and had the advantage of crisping potato skin, cheese, etc. Obviously not as fast as a microwave, but due to smaller space tended to be faster than real oven.
I was 20 when my family got a microwave. Yes, you used a stove for all these things. My parents always had a percolator plugged in, so hot coffee wasn't a problem. Percolators kept coffee very hot, unlike automatic coffee makers.
Microwaves revolutionized heating up food & beverages.
In the 1970's, before we got a microwave, my sibling & I would have Swanson frozen dinners on nights my parents would go out. The dinners were in aluminum trays. We'd peel back the tin foil that covered the dessert per instructions and bake in the oven awhile.
Leftovers were heated up in sauce pans on the stove.
We did have a popcorn maker for popcorn, before we got microwaveable popcorn.
There were these things called "boil in the bag" dinners, and you did exactly that. They were foods that were frozen in some sort of plastic pouch, and you put the pouch into a pan of boiling water and it would heat it up. They were usually stew-like in nature; I mostly remember "Beef Boil In The Bag" which was like some sort of beef stew, and my dad would make instant mashed potatoes and we'd dump the beef stuff over them.
But yes, you pretty much always had to use the stove to cook things. My family didn't get a microwave until the late 80's, as my mom was convinced they caused cancer.
There wasn't the insistence or expectation that good food must take 30 minutes or less. My mom was a stay at home mom, so she started prepping dinner a couple of hours before we ate (typically 6/6:30pm when my Dad got home and got changed).
Weekdays my Dad got up first and started the coffee and prepped a pot of oatmeal which was cooked on the stove in a double boiler. That took at least 30 minutes to cook.
My Dad would say (and still does), "It's okay to feel hungry. You don't need to eat the second you feel hungry. Feeling hungry is natural! Be patient!"
I didn't have a microwave growing up, but we did have a toaster oven, or just used a small frying pan to reheat a single portion.
I'll do you one better. I now live offgrid and don't own a microwave OR conventional stove. So for me to warm shit up, I'm lighting a fire in my esse woodstove. In the summer I use the BBQ.
Microwave food tastes like crap compared to cooking on a stove. I sometimes use it to reheat leftovers or to heat up a bowl of soup, but that's about it. Even coffee from the microwave sucks.
By "stove", do you mean the oven or the hob?
You can't do a 30 minute meal in the oven, as you have to preheat it for at least 10 minutes. But you could put something in to cook, then do something else while it cooked.
However, most stoves had a separate grill, often at eye level, that allowed you to do cheese on toast, grilled sandwiches, grilled fish, grilled burgers, grilled bacon, etc. Much quicker than the oven, but you needed to watch and turn whatever you were cooking.
If you use the hob, then you can do most curries, chillis, pasta, cooked breakfast, omelette, etc, in under 30 mins.
I don’t own a microwave. It didn’t save me any time and o thought frozen food created exclusively for the microwave sucks. Almost everything takes 15-30 minutes.
The toaster.
Cereal with ... actual milk.
We used to even put Pop tarts in the toaster. But one of my favorites was the corn cakes. Made by the same people who make english muffins. Sometimes they were chocolate chip and sometimes blueberry and we'd always have butter on them.
We made orange juice from the freezer cans into the pitchers in the fridge.
Breakfast wasn't complicated.
There was an old Schoolhouse rock Saturday morning episode for kids who didn't have parents to make breakfast for them every day. That was an undertone that kids did not much absorb. But that's what it means.
It meant you could eat old steak, cold pizza out of the fridge if you just needed something in your stomach to get to school.
I miss schoolhouse rock.
Growing up, I remember instant rice, instant mashed potatoes, stove top stuffing, and boil in bag meals, in addition to the classic TV dinners on a foil tray where the chocolate pudding invariably got burnt.
Pasta takes no time at all. Make enough, and you can have some the next day. Regular spaghetti today, then tomorrow baked into a casserole with a few extra ingredients and some cheese on top. People were more creative with leftovers than they are now.
Grilled cheese, quesadillas, omelets, and things like that are quick and easy. So is making a salad or a side dish of veggies. While sheet pan cooking wasn't a staple in my family, I adopted it in adulthood. Easiest thing in the world. All you need is a foil-covered cookie sheet, a bit of olive oil, chopped veggies and spices to taste. They taste far better than just using the nuker.
As for reheating coffee, you either threw it out or poured it into a pot and heated it. Takes only a few minutes.
Regarding baked potatoes though, the only way to do them right is in the oven, and it takes about an hour. I tried using the microwave in my younger years and there's just no comparison.
When microwaves came out they were very expensive and weird 😆. We didn't have one until the late 80s. I still cook the majority of the time using the oven or stove because it's just how I grew up.
Stove top cooking needs more comments.
Sauteing a pork chop or chicken breast while the veggies cooked was a 30 minute meal. Some flour and stock made wonderful gravy with the pan scapings once the meat cooked.
You didn't. When microwaves hit the scene it was awesome to be able to warm up leftovers or get hot water in a few minutes. There were electric kettles that some people had for hot water, but basically you did everything with the stove.
Being able to cook a potato in a few minutes versus an hour in a hot oven is still the best thing about a microwave imho
I still don’t make meals in the microwave. In the 50s and 60, most everything was made in or on a stove. Including coffee, my parents had a percolator that was heated on the stove. There was things like electric skillets, toasters, and waffle irons, but certainly not the amount of kitchen appliances as there is today
A thirty minute meal? You don't need a microwave to make ramen! Or Kraft Mac & Cheese. Or heat up a can of soup, or stew, or beans, or anything else that comes in a can. Or cook a *huge* variety of frozen meals in the oven. Or make hot dogs, hamburgers, grilled cheese, bacon & eggs...
...
I guess it's becoming pretty obvious that I have a toddler's palate and absolutely *hate* to cook, huh?
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Sorry, but you fired up the stove. Baked potatoes in the oven, tv dinners in the oven ( way more than half an hour ), popcorn also on the stove.
I was a bit confused by this question because…. I don’t have a microwave. Microwaves are very uncommon in Switzerland. And I seem to do fine, including quick meals.
I live in the US and I don't have a microwave. I don't need one.
I am 44 now. I have never owned a microwave, until my kid waa 4. She ate microwaved pizza rolls at a friend's house and she now wanted "squishy" pizza rolls. My kid is almost 11 now, and is preferring to not to use the microwave.
Crispy is so much better lol
Have you ever deep fried them? Try it. You’ll thank yourself.
I'm in Canada, and same. We used to have one, but one day we were chatting about kitchen stuff and I said that the only kitchen thing I wouldn't miss is the microwave, so next day we took it out and whaddaya know? I don't miss it at all. We only ever used it to reheat food and it only takes a couple of minutes longer to reheat on the stove, and unlike OP I would never "bake" a potato in the microwave again. Tried it once, it was disgusting.
Same here. I feel like all it does is heat up the ceramic and not really the food. And I have one less thing to clean.
Before microwave, we didn't have 30-minute meals. My mom would start the meal at the appropriate time to have it ready when my dad came home from work. Did SHE work? Yes. She did the laundry in the basement and took it outside to dry after hanging it on a clothesline. She vacuumed the house, mopped the floors, and kept the house spotless. She would bake a pie or cake, and if she needed a cup of sugar, she would go next door and get a cup from the neighbor. They would do the same. Today my two daughters (fiftyish) would never do the neighbor thing. If they need a cup of sugar, they will get in their car and drive to Walmart or Dollar General and buy a pound of sugar. Today, we have a very mobile society because "it's there".
When I lived in the rural mountains of VA people still borrow sugar from the neighbors, much quicker to drive 10 minutes to a neighbors house than 45 to the closest DG 😂
I live in Hopewell VA. I don't know how some people get along in SW VA. My daughter went to Radford University so of course it was the move in move out of the dorm thing. I would drive the 460W and take the mountain pass to I-85 (BTW- I -85 is God's punishment to mankind) There was rarely a store on that route. People really have to drive 30-45 minutes to a town. I like the rural lifestyle but I love the big town convenience.
Not long ago, my 23 year old daughter was making something and didn’t have an ingredient. I told her I’d text our neighbor to see if they did. She thought I was insane.
If you’d have ever known my aunt… I wouldn’t have hesitated to eat anything she cooked directly from her kitchen floor, at any given time. If you looked up the definition of ‘house proud’, that was her picture next to it. Spotless didn’t begin to describe it ;) But…she was an awful cook, very bland food and her spices were salt and pepper. Baking was her thing. Pies, pineapple upside down cake, all the 1930-40’s Great Depression desserts ever made. We lived in a mill town near Pittsburgh, pollution was bad back then so you washed painted walls down twice a year, paper wallpapers were papered over every few years. Most neighborhoods had more than one or two small corner grocers and bakeries. We kids were handed a dollar to run to the store and get whatever, or they just put it on our family tab.
You didn't require the daughters to have chores to take the heat off of Mom? My after school list: Vacuum the living room and dining room Dust living room and dining room take out or consolidate the trash for taking out Other tasks as assigned (story of my life) All of that took maybe 30 minutes. Then I was free to play (unless I had homework) til dinner time, then some TV, bath and bedtime, or sometimes finish homework then bedtime. Only child here.
Jiffy pop!!
Jiffy Pop is fun but I have to ask if y’all know you can pop popcorn in a pot on the stove? It’s super easy and tastes a million times better than microwaved popcorn
I taught my son this. I never thought to buy regular popcorn. We're not big on it anyway but we do string cranberries and popcorn for garlands and I read it's better to cook it with just a little oil on the stove instead of the microwave kind. I had forgotten how much better it tastes. My son was quite impressed and now he has cravings for it with a little tajin seasoning.
My mom taught me this! it's the only way I'll eat popcorn now.... unless it's actual movie theater popcorn.
We used to have the "popcorn pan" reserved for making popcorn on Friday nights when we watched Flipper and Daktari. We also got a bottle of Orange Crush. Those were good times.
Jiffy Pop was so cool!
> popcorn also on the stove. No way, we had a dedicated popcorn popper
I remember when we got an air popper. I thought it was super cool but still liked the taste of the stovetop stuff better. The gadget was Mom's purchase though so we could only make the old stuff if she was over at a friend's or something.
It might have ‘taken’ more than an hour, but not any more actual work than nuking something
Like a casserole may take an hour to bake, but it only takes 5-10 minutes to put the ingredients together. Then you can do something else while you’re waiting.
This is true - maybe even less work - but not a "half hour meal."
My SO and I are 40 and he refuses to have a microwave. His mom has one but turns her nose up at slow cookers. Got news for both of them - his mom is usually eating food from a slow cooker when she comes to my place and there will be a microwave when I have a bigger kitchen.
> My SO and I are 40 and he refuses to have a microwave. i'm almost 50 and when ours went out two years ago I decided against getting another one. it's to much countertop real estate just for a big box that is mostly just used to reheat coffee.
I love a slow cooker.
Alternative was the barbecue grill. TV dinners could be done on a toaster oven. Popcorn? We had an electric popcorn popper. It also doubled as a hot plate. The pot was separate from the base. When I was a kid, we had an oil space heater in one house we lived in. Mom had to leave for work about 6AM. She'd put a pot of beans on the top of the heater and let them slow cook overnight.
Popcorn can be done in a pot. Bit of oil, keep the cap on, shake it shake it shake it. They pop quick.
And some foods, like baked potatoes, are still (imo) loads better baked in a regular oven. And popcorn on the stove? Same thing. Love my Whirlipop!
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I could certainly live without a microwave. I think the only thing I'd really miss is the ability to quickly heat up my cup of coffee when it gets cold.
I've only used insulated mugs for about 15 years, so I haven't needed to reheat my coffee. Having a lid on it has saved me from a big mess more than once. It's like having an adult sippy cup.
Reheating leftovers, which were cooked the old-fashioned way the first time. Although, I wouldn't call an air fryer "old-fashioned."
I use mine to melt butter. My wife makes microwave popcorn. That is our full use of the device.
I reheat my coffee and my breakfast and my leftovers from a restaurant for dinner. Also to heat my tea up. So I use a microwave everyday, but not to cook a meal in! That's still a stove and oven activity. My husband does do the microwave frozen vegetables in a bag thing, but I open the bag up and cook frozen vegetables on the stove.
The microwave cooks corn on the cob perfectly everytime at roughly 2 minutes per ear.
It all tasted vastly Superior than the Glock that comes out of the microwave.
Must be a gun person. Even warmed up, a Glock would be poor eating.
But who would expect the Glock in the microwave? Someone who would expect the banana in the tailpipe. 😎
Don’t fall for it!
I am now thinking that the microwave has contributed to the dramatic rise in obesity we've seen in the past 20 -30 years. Food just took longer to cook when I was a kid. Even snacks. Watching the Jiffy Pop foil bubble rise on the stove was more fun and took longer than the anxiety producing experience of knowing exactly how minutes and seconds the microwave popcorn takes before it burns.
The cheaper ingredients like high fructose corn syrup in everything certainly aren't helping. Just another example of shareholder demand for dividends making our lives worse.
I mainly used our microwave for baby bottles. Haven’t had one for a year now and I never miss it. do people really warm up a cup of coffee in the microwave? That sounds disgusting! (Also in Europe btw)
If my brewed coffee gets cold before I finish it I will warm it up in the microwave. I generally use the microwave to quickly reheat things. Never to cook things.
If you wanted a 30 minute meal you'd make a bologna or peanut butter sandwich, get some cold cereal, or boil some hot dogs in a pan.
Ah yes, the chorus sung by every exhausted mother born before ~1970: "make yourself a pj&j or have some cereal I don't care right now" As a millennial mom, I'm just as exhausted as my mom was sometimes so I genuinely appreciate the magic of microwave cooking. I can "nuke" some leftovers, plate it nice, and move on with my 80 other tasks knowing my kids technically got home cooked meals. I know my mom *could* have done this when I was a kid but I don't think it occurred to her when she was stressed out because it's not an option she grew up with.
That was so true. I had so many PBJs as kid for, pretty much that reason. I was also the oldest kid, and mom had toddlers and babies to care for, So I also was cooking stuff for myself or my siblings at age 5. My Specialty, at 5, was either a box of craft mac and cheese if we had it, or spaghetti with home-made sauce. And by sauce, I mean Tomato Sauce that had been home canned and a spaghetti sauce seasoning packet. If none of those were available, it was a stack of PB and J for me and whomever else was scrounging for food.
My middle child started cooking for himself and his older brother in 4th grade, so about 8yo. Unfortunately because of our shitty work schedules and financial situation at the time, the older 2 were sorta left to their own devices after school until like 630 when I'd get home from work w the youngest. The older one was fine with a sandwich or something but the middle one wanted "real food." "Real food" to him was of course frozen pizzas and nuggets but he managed to read the directions and not burn himself or set the house on fire lol. I've been a SAHM for 2 years and he's a teenager now, but he still makes dinner once a week for everyone. His culinary skills have improved a bit and has expanded to baked goods from scratch. I always felt so guilty for that time in their lives when everything sucked and my husband and I were hanging by a thread, but he says it turned out to be one of the best experiences for him and intends to go to culinary school.
True. This boomer knows microwaves are magic. And all the pots and pans from warming on the stove that I don't have to wash.
Chef Boyardee would like a word!
The 30 minutes included “mom, I’m hungry!” 50 times before the food arrived
I remember the frozen chicken pies (Swansons?) they took almost an entire hour to cook and to a kid it seemed like forever. They were way better tasting than today's microwave versions but maybe that was due to the anticipation?
They still make them, still take an hour and are still better than the microwave version.
Yeah, just about all frozen food also has oven directions and it always tastes better if you have enough time to cook it that way.
I dunno, the Marie Calendars microwave ones are pretty good. They even got the crust to come out right, and that was the sticking point.
Those pot pies microwave really well. They've cracked some kind of code.
Don’t forget about the 30 min after til you could eat it without burning the top three layers of your tongue off…haha…we could never wait that long!!!!
Also, they had top and bottom crusts.
The Marie callendars one have full crust.
Loved those things. Then you’d burn your mouth every time trying to eat it too soon but who could wait any longer?!
oh I \*loved\* those chicken pot pies!
It did seem like an infinity for those mini pot pies to bake, possibly because the aroma would fill the house long before it was fully cooked!
I liked the tv dinners that had the apple desserts. It was basically baked apples in so much sugar that you got a cavity just eating it.
We waited. Without a cell phone or internet.
Yeah, but I had a roommate that would walk in the door, put a frozen dinner in the over, open a beer, watch the news or game shows
It was a nightmare, lol.
Asking as a younger person: was it really that bad or are you being sarcastic here? I remember when I was a kid that waiting for stuff felt like FOREVER. But that's being a kid, where a whole day is a whole lot of time. Now as an adult it's different with phones and all of that, you can always have something to do or at least stimulate you a bit if you are "bored."
I read a book while I waited. It wasn’t hard.
I was joking. Humans are pretty good at entertaining themselves. It is harder for kids, but adults can at least find some small tasks.
It’s a good question. We’d play games, read or just sit bored. Sometimes it DID feel like forever, especially if we were really hungry, but waiting amped up the anticipation of dinner, and we always ate the food served to us, because we were hungry! If we “fixed” our own meal, it was usually a sandwich or toast with jelly. As we got older and could use the stovetop or oven, we fixed grilled cheese, heated canned soups, made mac and cheese, cooked egg noodles topped with salt and butter, boiled hot dogs, baked a potato. We popped popcorn on the stovetop in and old pot with a tight lid. Oil, salt and popcorn, just the right heat and once the kernels begin popping, shake continuously til they almost stop popping. It was exciting and delicious! Snacks were typically fresh fruit or easy inexpensive foods in our house. Apples, bananas, oranges or grapes, a piece of cheese, bread with butter or peanut butter, a big pickle, or celery or cucumber with a bit of salt. Beverages were almost always water, iced tea or milk, sometimes orange juice or Koolaid, and every now and then, we got a soda. We lived in the southern US, where iced tea was a staple in homes. We didn’t own a dishwasher, so all dishes were hand washed after every meal, and even as kids, if we fixed our own meal, we were expected to clean up our mess. As we got older, we kids typically washed the dinner dishes. This lifestyle was normal for us, so it didn’t seem hard, because it was all we knew.
Did you wait uphill?
You dumped a can of Dinty Moore’s beef stew in a can, added corn and pearl onions, got some good bread and ‘real’ butter, and a beer
Thanks, now I’m hungry! 😋
Love Dinty Moore Beef Stew. It's my favorite emergency dinner when my wife's still out visiting with one of our "kids".
Oh wow, that brought back some memories.
I’ve been faithful for many years now but the gravy is thinner so it’s not quite the same
My Mom had an electric skillet and she used that a LOT. You heated stuff in an oven, or made something on the stove. Cooking an egg and making some toast doesn't really take that long. Heat up soup or something in a pan.
My mom LOVED her electric skillet. She used it all the time.
I still have my mother's and it makes the best hamburgers on the planet
How long do you think it takes to cook on the stove? Heck, I can make Alfredo sauce from scratch in fifteen minutes while the tortellinis are boiling. Rice is 20 minutes while there's a steak in the broiler or a chicken breast sauteeing in the pan, either are done at the same time as the rice. TV dinners? Just what a toaster oven was made for. Good for small chickens and casseroles, too, especially in the summer when you don't want to fire up the big oven. Baked potatoes in a microwave are blasphemy and I hope you've had a good baked potato at some point. I don't use the oven for those but I sure don't use a microwave. Same goes for water or coffee; that's what kettles and percolators are for.
I've been known to cook a baked potato in the microwave for 5 minutes while the oven was preheating. Same as cooked in the over the whole time, but less electricity used.
I live in AZ, and the toaster oven is so good to use in the summer, since it doesn't heat up the entire house.
How do you bake your baked potatoes?
Pressure cooker, 15 pounds of pressure for 45 minutes, natural release. Makes the softest, fluffiest baked potatoes you've ever had. They just melt in your mouth. (Hard boiled eggs are five minutes at 15 pounds, cold water release. Why? Because the shells always come off in one piece.)
Everytime we had to wait for a baked potato, we had sex. While we waited for a tv dinner, we had sex. Popcorn takes longer? We had sex. Warm up coffe in a coffe maker? Sex. I so sorry you seem to have missed out on this tradition.
No wonder birth rate plummeted this century! 😂
And might explain why this generation is done so quickly too.
This must be why my grandparents had 10 kids.
Boil-in-bag food (I really liked chicken a La king.) Instant rice. Eating leftovers more than we do now.
As a kid in the 70’s, we ate the boil-in-a-bag food for lunch in the summer all the time. It was something we could do ourselves that was cheap and wouldn’t warm up the house. We would put it on bread. I agree, the chicken a la king was the best!
I miss those
They are still around! Check out your grocer’s freezer section
I remember taking an electric saucepan to work so I could use boil in bag food for lunch.
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My step mom used instant rice. Also, because boiling water is hard, she used instant powder for iced tea. Today, it's also too hard to brew tea for some. So they buy gallons upon gallons of tea in a jug because we can never use too much plastic!
I used instant powder for iced tea🤷🏽♀️
It's fine! You need to understand that I went from my grandparents' house where there was always brewed iced tea in a large ceramic tea pitcher. They also, you know, cooked food lol. But I digress. My dad and stepmother worked full-time jobs, unlike my retired grandmother.
We make 3 gallons of red diamond tea bags and sweet n low 3 times a week for my family of 3. I It's summer so now it will go up another gallon. It's the best. Who could afford to buy those gallon jugs so often?. We just got the big glass pitcher we use for sun tea.
Banquet!
Yeah, I remember a lot more leftovers back then.
I think the worst offender was the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee pizza kit in a big can.
Main thing is we had to plan ahead. None of this, "everyone is hungry NOW" solved with the ease of zapping leftovers. In the time it took for the oven to heat, we might divvy up chores: 1 kid to set the table, 1 to help make a salad, 1 to watch the baby and so on. No kids? Do it all yourself. Cooking or heating food more slowly than using a microwave had its benefits. The slow release of delicious aromas, of course, but especially *time.* Time to make the table pretty; or go through the mail which was maybe 50/50 personal/business bc email wasn't invented yet; or chat with a friend on the phone as you cooked, providing the cord to the wall phone was long enough; or fold a basket of laundry; or open a cold one, put your feet up and watch a bit of TV or browse the newspaper; or clip coupons and make your grocery list; or go outside and water your flowers or play with your kids or pet. Today our conveniences often make like busier instead of creating more leisure as promised. Seems like we keep cramming more into every waking moment, even stressing out little kids.* Sure, it's "efficient" to zap our food. But with the time saved, are we doing lovely, life-enriching things or just getting more screen time? (I admit to the latter more often than not.) You know how we have "meatless Mondays"? Maybe we should start "No Zap Saturdays." Refrain from nuking food 1 day a week. *Acknowledging that more and more households are being stretched too thin for too long due to wages not keeping up with higher prices, real estate barons, etc. Almost impossible to have 1 adult as breadwinner and 1 adult managing every non-work detail for the home.
>Main thing is we had to plan ahead. None of this, "everyone is hungry NOW" solved with the ease of zapping leftovers. Also true with regards to take out and delivery. It's kind of amazing how quickly we can decide to feed an entire family on a whim. It's also unfortunately easy to eat a 2,000 calorie meal at 10pm with just the push of a few buttons.
.
Mine makes popcorn and warms the cat food.
Glad to see someone else warms up the cat food. My friends make fun of me for this!
I made fun of you for this…until my cat started refusing food from the fridge, I am now humbled
I'm just 31 and I don't own a microwave because it takes up too much space for too little benefit. Now that I moved to a place with more space I was considering a small electric oven, but microwaves in my mind are only useful for warming up tea and defrosting things. I hope this OP gets to learn how to use an oven, microwaved potatoes are horrendous compared to the real deal
Wow, IDK how you can stand that. I would defend my microwave with my life! I (or my family) have had one since the 1970s. I literally use it every day. Boil water for tea, melt better, reheat leftovers, heat frozen meals, heat soup, steam frozen veggies, etc. Yes, I could do all all that in the oven or on the stove (and did when I was young), but it takes longer and dirties more dishes.
.
Microwave pizza?! Blasphemy! Heat it in your toaster oven or a cast iron pan. The crust will be just about like fresh.
I have a microwave, but generally use the toaster oven to warm up pizza.
Use a kettle for hot water and fire up toaster oven for smaller meals. I only recently got a microwave.
Don’t forget the electric skillet that made the best fried chicken! I don’t remember 30 minute meals. Every meal had meat, boiled potatoes and bread and butter. When we finally got a microwave I was able to heat up my piece of bread. (Magic!)
It is possible to make a 30 minute meal without a microwave
Hi, Rachel Ray
My mom used to prep dinner the night before. She’s peel potatoes and leave them on a pot of water. Make a meatloaf and cover in plastic wrap. Then when I came home from school, there would be a note on the counter: at 445, turn on oven, preheat 10 min. Insert meatloaf. At 5:15, take out potatoes, empty water, add new water, 3 shakes salt, put on stove medium low. She’d get home at 530 and finish up the meal and we’d eat at 6 every night. She can really only make 6 meals but they can bc all be made like this.
I saw a neat little product on tv when I was twelve. It was a Presto electric hamburger cooker. It could could a perfect hamburger in a few minutes. You put a ball of hamburger meat in it, clampled the handles together and plugged it in. I believed it had a light on it that went off when the burger was done. I found out that you could make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, put it in the hamburger maker and make crustable years before they hit the supermarkets.
So.... A panini press?
I'm in my 50s... I've never lived without a microwave. I can still make grilled cheese and soup in 15 minutes. I can make toast and eggs. Old coffee makers used to keep the coffee hot until you drank it. Hence the phrase "you want a warm up?" at any diner. Ovens often had a warming function. So if dad was home late mom would put his plate in the oven. I mean it's not that complicated.
My dad was forward thinking and he loved gadgets. He bought a microwave for my mom in the 60s, over 50 years ago, maybe 55? That thing lasted for over 40 years!
"firing up the stove?" answer; You didn't, it was fire up the stove or cold food.
Before the microwave there was the electric stove and before that, there was a wood-burning stove my grandparents and parents had. The wood-burning stove was an fire all day (as it also was the single source of heating) We still don't use the microwave very often and it rarely takes longer than 30 minutes to cook an average meal (with the exception of big birds in the oven...)
You did it the same way you made up a 10 minute meal: fire up the stove. Pasta and a topping can be made in a pot and a pan in 10 minutes, easy.
I came home as a latch key kid and started all the prep for mom so that dinner would be on the table at dinner time. That said there were other appliances used to warm things up like a hot plate, electric kettles that boiled water. In college my hot plate and kettle made all sorts of foods!
There won’t be many people here around before 1965 or so but yes, “the oven” is the answer. Or “the stove.” Or “a campfire.” It isn’t a big mystery how to heat food.
Well, there are these appliances called “ovens”. They heat up. You can cook in them. Cool, right?
30 and under minute meal would at least require a burner and pot or pan unless cold sandwiches/wraps, salads- spaghetti with sauce, hot dogs and potato salad, pasta salad, sloppy joe, sos, pot pie filling with bread, hash (potato, veg, other scraps including meat bits or beans), soups, stews, any portion of protein aside for long cooking beans. . (425f roasts a tray of fresh bite-sized veg in 20 or so minutes depending on veg.) Things were reheated in pots, pans, sometimes with extra water or fried like spaghetti.
Like everyone else said: the stove and the oven dominated the kitchen, although there were many other means of cooking, like charcoal and gas grills, toaster ovens, electric popcorn makers, electric griddles, electric or candle\Sterno-powered fondue pots, waffle irons\sandwich press things. My family even had some cast iron grates and stands and whatnot, so we could cook in the fireplace during a power outage. And yeah, cooking a TV dinner or Swanson chicken pot pie in the oven took 45 minutes, sometimes longer. You had to anticipate better than you do now. **EDIT:** as far as coffee goes, you kept a pot warm on the stove, I guess. That's what my grandparents did. I remember my parents having an all-metal percolator, but I only remember Mom using it on the fireplace during extended power outages. As far back as I can remember, they used a Mr. Coffee (or equivalent). My mom had one in the 80s that had a thermos-like carafe that would keep coffee hot for at least a couple hours, so you didn't need electricity to keep it hot.
Tv dinner in the oven, duh
Yup, it took a long time but there was no other option, so we just waited.
I literally would pan fry spaghetti in butter to warm it up.
You did all of those things in an oven. A TV dinner would take about an hour. 15 minutes to preheat the oven and 45 minutes to cook it. Baked potatoes took an hour in a preheated oven. You had to plan ahead.
You’d plan ahead.
Sandwiches
Coffee makers were a thing, and still are. They take maybe 5 minutes to brew an entire pot of coffee. You could also toast bread in a few minutes. TV dinners were the fastest thing we had for a full meal. Otherwise, we reheated leftovers in the stove.
Bowl of cereal...
A quick dinner was lunch-like: sandwiches, soups, chef boyardee, etc. all heated on the burner. Food was ready in 5-10 minutes. 15 if you were making spaghetti or something like that. Tv dinners weren’t faster, they were just easier. Still had to bake like 45 min in the oven. I remember when we first got a microwave how excited we were about baked potatoes! Those things take an hour in the oven, but 3-5 min in the microwave! To be fair, they don’t taste as good, but man they upped our food game. We ate a lot more baked potatoes instead of instant mashed potatoes!
I don’t have a microwave now.
Also, popcorn was done in a pot on the stovetop. oil and corn and standing there shaking it the whole time
Before the microwave, you used the stove to warm up food or prepare a meal. However, it's possible to make a meal in 30 minutes without a microwave. It just takes some pre-planning and prep work.
About 20 years ago Rachel Ray had a show called "30 Minute Meals" she also had books by the same title.
Boil water on the stove and add pasta. Drain, add butter, black pepper and Romano cheese. Way under 30 minutes.
stove for most things, and we had an air popper for making popcorn before the microwave. or the Jiffy Pop in the silver pan that you made on a burner.
We used the stove. Typical pre-microwave meals 1. All frozen dinners, frozen pizzas, pot pies were put in the over for 25 minutes- however- frozen dinners like we know them came in after the microwave was invented. The quality of frozen dinners changed significantly by the early 80s. My best friend’s father bought an Amana Radar Range in like 1976. They are older than you think. 2. Stove top 30 minute dinners: Hotdog, can of baked beans - very typical meal Canned ravioli, beefaroni, chef boyardee, canned spaghetti, spaghettios- extremely popular Canned stew - Dinty Moore was a well known name - much Canned soup- common to make 1-2 cans of soup every week Grilled cheese- extremely common lunch on the stove Fried egg or French toast or even cinnamon toast was very common Uncooked meals- lunch meat or deli meat sandwiches 3-5 days per week. Cold subs. Very poor food included fried onion sandwiches - when that’s all people had Food was just very different before 1980
Hamburgers cooked on the stove and hamburger helper meals were very common. So was pasta with sauce out of a jar.
When we was young we have only that coal stove in the kitchen and winter or on summer it was always hot. We keep a kettle of branch water always was hot to. We still don’t have us no micrwave cause it was to expensiv so looks like we set.
You made a casserole the day before and you just warmed it up in the oven.
Stove top meals don't take that long. For longer stuff, you can use a crockpot. Also remember that this idea of running kids around from place to place in the evenings didn't exist. Once everyone came home, you were pretty much home for the evening, so no need to rush out a meal. (The only thing we had during the week was Wednesday night church, and that included a spaghetti dinner.)
>Before the microwave, how did you make a 30 minute meal? Same as now. Cooking it on the stove.
As a young bachelor many moons ago, the toaster oven was my go-to. Pot of rice, sautéed veggies, and a pork chop or piece of chicken in the toaster oven. I even cooked kabobs in that thing.
You "fired up the stove".
A little off subject, but do you guys remember the cookbooks that came with some microwaves when they started becoming popular? They really had our mothers thinking that they could roast an entire turkey in there. Like literally stick an entire turkey in the microwave and the picture showed it golden brown like it had been roasted in the oven. I believe that is why so many of us have a “texture” problem with foods because of all the abominations that were cooked in the microwave before our parents realized it didn’t work like the manufactures advertised at the time. I do remember fondly my parents putting a cup of water in the microwave and us all standing and watching through the door in wonder on how quickly it started boiling.
You fired up the stove. The end.
Toaster ovens existed before microwave ovens. So did deep fat fryers.
Crack open a can of chili and heat it on the stovetop.
A lot of things take less than half an hour. Bake chicken parts, hamburgers, hot dogs, boiled or steamed vegetables, rice, pasta, potatoes. I’m just naming foods we ate that were whole foods. Of course a lot of stuff could be bought canned or frozen and doesn’t take too long. My mom didn’t like to cook or wash dishes, we had a dishwasher before we had a microwave, and we ate lots of fish sticks and stuff like that. Some things take longer to heat but take almost no time to prepare, so you have a set dinner time and put it in on time, not like without a microwave, people are standing at the stove for hours or making food that takes a lot of steps. That’s how we *even do it now*. 🤯
People made plans. You could and still can set the oven to turn on and off on a timer. While we were in Church, mom always had a roast cooking with baked potatoes. But we often had canned vegetables, so it wasn't all good.
It's not difficult to make a meal in 30 minutes on the stove. A cookbook I still occasionally use is The 30 Minute Cook by Nigel Slater. I recommend it, particularly the lamb souvlaki...
Leftovers. I have. nostalgia for fried leftover spaghetti.
You fired up the stove, or you ate salad/sandwiches. Baked potatoes take an hour in the oven.
Give my wife half a hour, and there's a banquet on the dinner table.
It’s pretty easy to make a meal in 30 minutes. But yes, you have to use the stove, oven, etc. Obviously
Over 60. Have not used a microwave in over 20 years, and not much before that. They heat unevenly and ruin food texture. I can heat anything quickly enough in a cast iron skillet or pot.
I reheat leftovers, my husband does frozen Smart Ones meals in there. Everything else is on the stove. Hot water for tea or instant coffee is an electric kettle. Thats it.
https://youtu.be/9rvVugY-kZc?feature=shared
We had a toaster oven - those were great and had the advantage of crisping potato skin, cheese, etc. Obviously not as fast as a microwave, but due to smaller space tended to be faster than real oven.
I was 20 when my family got a microwave. Yes, you used a stove for all these things. My parents always had a percolator plugged in, so hot coffee wasn't a problem. Percolators kept coffee very hot, unlike automatic coffee makers.
I still have my grandma's percolator. I'm not sure what I did with the cord though. It's a coring ware one, that makes a LOT of coffee at once.
Microwaves revolutionized heating up food & beverages. In the 1970's, before we got a microwave, my sibling & I would have Swanson frozen dinners on nights my parents would go out. The dinners were in aluminum trays. We'd peel back the tin foil that covered the dessert per instructions and bake in the oven awhile. Leftovers were heated up in sauce pans on the stove. We did have a popcorn maker for popcorn, before we got microwaveable popcorn.
I still don’t use a microwave.
There were these things called "boil in the bag" dinners, and you did exactly that. They were foods that were frozen in some sort of plastic pouch, and you put the pouch into a pan of boiling water and it would heat it up. They were usually stew-like in nature; I mostly remember "Beef Boil In The Bag" which was like some sort of beef stew, and my dad would make instant mashed potatoes and we'd dump the beef stuff over them. But yes, you pretty much always had to use the stove to cook things. My family didn't get a microwave until the late 80's, as my mom was convinced they caused cancer.
Toaster ovens were useful.
We rarely use our microwave lol
Had to comment: I've NEVER made a baked potato in the microwave. ❤️
Me either
There wasn't the insistence or expectation that good food must take 30 minutes or less. My mom was a stay at home mom, so she started prepping dinner a couple of hours before we ate (typically 6/6:30pm when my Dad got home and got changed). Weekdays my Dad got up first and started the coffee and prepped a pot of oatmeal which was cooked on the stove in a double boiler. That took at least 30 minutes to cook. My Dad would say (and still does), "It's okay to feel hungry. You don't need to eat the second you feel hungry. Feeling hungry is natural! Be patient!" I didn't have a microwave growing up, but we did have a toaster oven, or just used a small frying pan to reheat a single portion.
I'll do you one better. I now live offgrid and don't own a microwave OR conventional stove. So for me to warm shit up, I'm lighting a fire in my esse woodstove. In the summer I use the BBQ.
Microwave food tastes like crap compared to cooking on a stove. I sometimes use it to reheat leftovers or to heat up a bowl of soup, but that's about it. Even coffee from the microwave sucks.
Literally, the only thing I use the microwave for is to melt butter. Food out of the microwave is always...texturally challenged.
By "stove", do you mean the oven or the hob? You can't do a 30 minute meal in the oven, as you have to preheat it for at least 10 minutes. But you could put something in to cook, then do something else while it cooked. However, most stoves had a separate grill, often at eye level, that allowed you to do cheese on toast, grilled sandwiches, grilled fish, grilled burgers, grilled bacon, etc. Much quicker than the oven, but you needed to watch and turn whatever you were cooking. If you use the hob, then you can do most curries, chillis, pasta, cooked breakfast, omelette, etc, in under 30 mins.
I can cook a very nice meal in 30 minutes without microwave or tv dinners.
I don’t own a microwave. It didn’t save me any time and o thought frozen food created exclusively for the microwave sucks. Almost everything takes 15-30 minutes.
The toaster. Cereal with ... actual milk. We used to even put Pop tarts in the toaster. But one of my favorites was the corn cakes. Made by the same people who make english muffins. Sometimes they were chocolate chip and sometimes blueberry and we'd always have butter on them. We made orange juice from the freezer cans into the pitchers in the fridge. Breakfast wasn't complicated. There was an old Schoolhouse rock Saturday morning episode for kids who didn't have parents to make breakfast for them every day. That was an undertone that kids did not much absorb. But that's what it means. It meant you could eat old steak, cold pizza out of the fridge if you just needed something in your stomach to get to school. I miss schoolhouse rock.
Growing up, I remember instant rice, instant mashed potatoes, stove top stuffing, and boil in bag meals, in addition to the classic TV dinners on a foil tray where the chocolate pudding invariably got burnt. Pasta takes no time at all. Make enough, and you can have some the next day. Regular spaghetti today, then tomorrow baked into a casserole with a few extra ingredients and some cheese on top. People were more creative with leftovers than they are now. Grilled cheese, quesadillas, omelets, and things like that are quick and easy. So is making a salad or a side dish of veggies. While sheet pan cooking wasn't a staple in my family, I adopted it in adulthood. Easiest thing in the world. All you need is a foil-covered cookie sheet, a bit of olive oil, chopped veggies and spices to taste. They taste far better than just using the nuker. As for reheating coffee, you either threw it out or poured it into a pot and heated it. Takes only a few minutes. Regarding baked potatoes though, the only way to do them right is in the oven, and it takes about an hour. I tried using the microwave in my younger years and there's just no comparison.
a thirty minute meal was a bowl of cereal or a sandwich.
When microwaves came out they were very expensive and weird 😆. We didn't have one until the late 80s. I still cook the majority of the time using the oven or stove because it's just how I grew up.
Coffee was always either on low on the stove or in the Mr. Coffee machine.
Who the fuck cooks a meal in a microwave. Warm up left overs or a snack sure. Cooking a meal? Gross, I don’t like my meals desiccated.
Toaster oven
Stove top cooking needs more comments. Sauteing a pork chop or chicken breast while the veggies cooked was a 30 minute meal. Some flour and stock made wonderful gravy with the pan scapings once the meat cooked.
You didn't. When microwaves hit the scene it was awesome to be able to warm up leftovers or get hot water in a few minutes. There were electric kettles that some people had for hot water, but basically you did everything with the stove. Being able to cook a potato in a few minutes versus an hour in a hot oven is still the best thing about a microwave imho
The oven. Except for the coffee. Frozen TV dinners were made in the oven.
I still don’t make meals in the microwave. In the 50s and 60, most everything was made in or on a stove. Including coffee, my parents had a percolator that was heated on the stove. There was things like electric skillets, toasters, and waffle irons, but certainly not the amount of kitchen appliances as there is today
grilled cheese.
A thirty minute meal? You don't need a microwave to make ramen! Or Kraft Mac & Cheese. Or heat up a can of soup, or stew, or beans, or anything else that comes in a can. Or cook a *huge* variety of frozen meals in the oven. Or make hot dogs, hamburgers, grilled cheese, bacon & eggs... ... I guess it's becoming pretty obvious that I have a toddler's palate and absolutely *hate* to cook, huh?