If you still can't give up your frozen meals, at least check out this list of the best and worst picks from the frozen food aisle. See the 10 Best and Worst Frozen Foods now.
Think "microwave meal" and it likely conjures up a lot of unhealthy images -- from your college days, when all your meals came from a mini fridge and a microwave to your current world, where your full-size freezer is stocked with Lean Cuisine.
Let's face it: Meals you can nuke come in really handy. But they also come packed with a lot of bad-for-you ingredients -- from too much sodium to surprisingly high fat and calorie counts. But while microwave meals can be total diet bombs, they don't have to be. Tons of chefs, restaurant owners, and even Food Network stars all agree that you can use your microwave to actually cook healthy meals that don't come packaged in a box in the freezer aisle.
"Put fruit in a crepe for dessert, broil fish with some lemon juice, brown a potato casserole -- there are gorgeous, easy microwave recipes that you can whip up fast; you just need to be willing to experiment," says Mark X. Dowling, Vice President of Academics & Executive Chef of the Escoffier Online International Culinary Academy.
The biggest misconception people have about microwaves is that they can only be used to reheat meals or cook pre-packaged foods, says Dowling. And what he wants everyone to know is that microwave cooking is a viable way of cooking. And here's some more good news: Since you're not coating the food in oil or fat when you cook in a microwave, the method can actually be a lot healthier than cooking that same food on the stove or a grill.
So, we asked Dowling and some of the most ingenious cooks in the country to give us meal ideas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that require nothing more than a cutting board, a mixing bowl, and a microwave. That's right, these 8 easy microwave recipes are tasty, healthy, and seriously easy to whip up fast.
