I don’t have either a dishwasher or a garbage disposal either, and I live in Fort Worth. There’s a hole where the dishwasher should go, and we may fill it some day, especially if we decide to sell the house, but I’ll never actually use it. I prefer washing dishes by hand.
Couldn’t do without a microwave, though.
I hear everyone who does without a microwave. I HEAR YOU and I could live without one. Could. All through this thread I’ve been reading and remembering what my mother did to reheat, defrost, etc., nodding, remembering the past …
… but you will take my microwave when you pry it from my cold, dead button-pushing fingers. 
Recently I started using the preset buttons and let me tell you, it has changed my life. The “defrost” setting actually works. You tell it the weight, what type meat it is, and halfway through when it beeps you turn it over. Amazing, thawed chicken, fish, beef or whatever, no cooked spots and few even warm spots. I do a lot of stir-fry using frozen chicken tenderloins and I’m stir-frying from freezer to wok in less than 10 minutes…with thawed meat, in case that wasn’t clear.
I also steam nearly all my vegetables. I make kid-food in it constantly (many frozen kid things like bagel pizzas come with microwavable browning trays), warm up drinks … dear lord I could go on and on.
If your life is such that you can adjust and do without a microwave, more power to ya! But as a full-time working mother of three children who makes a home-cooked meal every night, it is vital. Vital!
One of the first appliances I bought for myself in my first apartment was a hot-air popcorn popper. Cost around $10, and pops just as fast as a microwave. You can pop in much greater quantity, too. The only downside is you’ll still need a way to melt butter, and without the microwave, you’re kinda limited to stove-top melting. Of course, you could also go with spray butter, which works pretty well, no melting necessary.
An electric kettle is nice, but you can make do with a stove-top kettle. Water boils faster in an enclosed space, and the whistle will let you know when it’s done. Takes up less space than yet another counter-top appliance, too.
Leftovers and frozen dinners, in my opinion, taste a whole lot better when cooked in a conventional oven than when cooked in the microwave. If a package has directions for both, use the conventional oven; it’ll take longer, but you’ll be a lot happier with the results.
About all we use our microwave for anymore is kid food (because when she’s hungry NOW, you have to get it ready fast) and certain quick-heat jobs. Like, when I make my stir-fry, I warm the sauce in the microwave so that it doesn’t cool everything down too much when I add it to the pan. It’s also good for heating up a single cup of water, if I’m making TheraFlu or something, but for cocoa and such, I prefer the kettle. I’ll give it this, though, it’s great for steaming veggies and melting chocolate.
Just curious, how do you heat shit up in 30 seconds or less?
Seriously, I didn’t realize the Mike could be scorned to the degree television gets around here by some. At this point it’s not even a luxury… just a cheap tool for heating food or beverages up; some minor cooking, like a quick baked potato, or warming up your coffee. It’s not meant to replace the stove, but some things just need some fast heat.
Don’t most hot air poppers have a detachable butter reservoir that sits on top? I’ve never seen one without one.
Some do, some don’t; mine doesn’t. Of course, I bought mine knowing that I’d be melting butter in the microwave, so the lack of a butter-melter didn’t matter to me.
I would think you’re right but I’m more of a stove top reheater if at all - I like yesterdays unheated leftovers.
Only on the SDMB do you run into people who hate microwave ovens. Heat leftovers in the oven? No, thanks. If I had time to do that, I’d have time to cook something new :). The microwave is strictly the best appliance for reheating most leftovers. And lunchtime at work would really suck…sandwiches every single day, or maybe soup in a thermos (and how early do you have to wake up to heat that on the stove in the morning?) As it is, we need more microwaves at work because the line for them is so long.
You may be my new favorite poster even though I doubt you would care.
The disdain for the microwave is just stupid and yes, elitist.
Just stop now or Obama may get sick. 
Yep, I just half-fill the sink with the hottest water my faucet will give and I have completely thawed chicken breasts, round steaks, or hamburger meat in less than 20-30 minutes. I just did it last night.
Life is obviously possible without a microwave, and it would be absurd to get too crazed on the topic. But, for those of you who don’t have or want microwaves … what in the world do you do with your vegetables?
We consume large quantities of fresh broccoli, string beans, and zucchini, and nothing beats a microwave for quick and healthy preparation. Yeah, you can use a steamer, but that’s more work for similar results. For example, I can throw some cut-up broccoli in the microwave, cook it to almost the point of readiness, then add some pesto or olive oil and bacon salt or tomato sauce and cook just a bit longer - voila, healthy tasty veggies!
I don’t eat them.
I honestly think that a microwave would seriously improve my diet. I might eat more vegetables. I might eat more leftovers. (I might not, but the prospect of heating it up in the microwave and tupperware for 3 minutes is less daunting than the idea of reheating in the oven again.
My past and current places didn’t come with microwaves or convenient spaces for them. When I do go by Home Depot, I think about having one installed over the stove, but when I’ve even had preliminary discussions about it with the sales people, it’s seemed like an expensive and difficult job.
So, no microwave.
I’ve been without a microwave for years. I don’t hate them or anything, but I’ve been living where they aren’t common. I’ve discovered I don’t really miss them and they don’t really do anything you can’t do just about as quickly some other way.
I actually like stove tops better for heating up leftovers. Most of my food is soups or sauces. I just put the pot or pan I cooked it in directly in the fridge. The next day, it’s ready to put right back on the stove to heat up. It’s a lot less messy and I never have cold spots in my food.
Heating up water or drinks on the stove or whatever doesn’t take any time at all. I put my pot of water on, walk away for five minutes to put on clothes or brush my teeth or whatever, and by the time I come back it’s boiling. It’s really not meaningfully slower than the microwave, though admittedly I live a life where I can lose 3 minutes a morning without it being a big deal.
Stove top popcorn is easy, and also doesn’t really take more time, though now and then I still burn a batch. The advantage to stove top popcorn is that I can make some truly massive batches of popcorn when guests come over- way easier than heating up multiple packages of microwave popcorn.
My partner and I don’t have a microwave in our house. I had a perfectly good one when I moved in and we got rid of it, preferring more “traditional” methods of cooking.
[quote=“Randy_Seltzer, post:1, topic:473022”]
Other things I can’t do:[ul][li]Microwave popcorn. This limits my popcorn-making abilities significantly. []Heat water quickly and efficiently (I use my coffee maker to heat water for tea) []Some frozen dinners don’t give directions for conventional ovens []Reheat leftovers. I eat most leftovers cold. Sometimes, I’ll stick it under the broiler, but this doesn’t usually produce very good results. []Fun with peeps.[/ul]I’m not complaining, of course. Just making some observations.[/li][/QUOTE]
[ul][li]Hot air popper. Yummier popcorn.[/li][li]Kettle. A good one is preety fast and you don’t get that weird foamy thing happening.[/li][li]Ew. Fresh foods all the way. [/li][li]When re-heating from a previously made dish that we froze, conventional methods seem to work just fine.[/ul][/li]
We are really, very, very busy people. Yet we don’t notice that not having a microwave slows us down or is an impediment in any way. I don’t think my mother could live without her microwave though.
Ooh, I would HATE to live without a microwave. I like that it will do stuff using a lot less energy than a conventional cooker. Oh, and that it will do its thing, then switch itself off, so I cannot forget something cooking if I am distracted by the telephone or whatever.
This adoration of popcorn-makers, on the other hand, is a mystery to me. 
They really are not that difficult to install above a stove. We went that route. We bought a microwave for around $100 at Home Depot, installed in over the stove in under an hour.
Really? Whenever I bring up the idea with the people at HD, they start talking about re-wiring my kitchen.
Vegetarian here and microwave non-owner. Yup, we steam them (and eat more than our fair share of raw foods). Don’t really notice it taking much longer than in a microwave. When we had a microwave, it tended to make our corn kernels all explodey-watery and some stuff we tried to reheat was not evenly heated, but no big deal, really.
We got rid of the microwave mainly because we never used it. We used to pretty much use it only for popcorn, but then we got an air popper as a gift and ended up preferring the non-chemically taste of regular popcorn and real butter. Now I can’t stand the artificial flavoring stuff they put in the microwave popcorn. And man, if you let microwave popcorn cook just a touch too long, that smoke is acrid, man!
As for saving time with a microwave, it hasn’t made a lick of difference now that we don’t have one. We don’t have cable because we’re too busy to watch TV, so it’s not like we have a surplus of time on our hands, but we honestly don’t seem to spend any more time cooking than we used to. If we want to thaw leftovers, we just stick 'em in the fridge before going to work. I haven’t missed a microwave at all.
::shrug::
So I dunno, it doesn’t particularly affect us one way or the other and I can’t think of any reason we would need to heat something in 30 seconds or less. We never needed to do so when we had a microwave, so I can’t think of any time we’d need to now.
Note: We don’t have kids and we don’t eat TV dinners. Maybe that makes a difference.
We’ve gone through two microwaves in our current apartment, with both dying. We assume it has something to do with the wiring (the building dates to 1904). We never got around to replacing the last one, and were surprised to find that we didn’t miss it much. We don’t eat a lot of TV dinners, and 90% of “microwavable” stuff can be cooked/heated in the oven or our grill+broil Foreman grill.
I’ve had to pass up a few frozen items at Trader Joe’s and there was a sitcom-worthy afternoon of confusion when a few friends and I wanted get get popcorn & watch a movie, but all in all, I don’t miss it at all, and no longer consider it a necessity. Especially since getting rid of it frees up a lot of our already-scarce counter space.
Look man, that’s just crazy talk. TWO! count em’ 2 minutes to make cup of soup. Screw the coffee. They sell that crap at Starbucks.