Microwave Cooking: Eating Healthy with (Mostly) Packaged Foods

I freaking love the microwave.

For one thing, it makes all my food – because if you know me, you know I don’t cook. Also, it’s soooo much easier to come home at the end of a long day and just pop something in there, rather than stand over the stove for hours just for something you’re gonna shove in your piehole in 5 minutes or less.

Unfortunately, and as people always told me about my microwave-cooking habits: packaged foods are usually not healthy. They’re often full of starches, sodium, preservatives, blah blah blah stop judging me. But, to my disappointment, all that can be true.

It’s already hard enough when a person is trying to eat healthier and exercise – so I don’t think that we should have to change our ENTIRE lifestyle and try to fit cooking in as well. So! Here are some tips and tricks for eating healthy AND keeping it easy-peasy-microweezy…

• Low sodium: To keep it simple, I just use the daily-value percentage thing on the package and try not to buy anything that’s too high a percentage per serving. I also drink a lot of water, just to be on the safe side.

• Microwave versions of things you used to have to cook/bake ie sweet potatoes, oatmeal, frozen veggies... the list is endless. If you Google your fave foods + “microwave recipes”, you’ll probably find even more.

• Frozen veggies count! On days that I already ate a microwavable meal and like two hours later I’m hungry, I’ll heat up a BUNCH of frozen veggies and to make them interesting, either sprinkle some parmesan cheese or dressing on them, or make it into soup.

• Leftovers! Don’t forget – if you take home half your meal from a restaurant (go you if you can do this – the struggle is real) that’s an awesome little microwavable meal for the next day!

• Find your happy (microwaveable meal) place: Mine is Trader Joe’s. I love them because they sell a lot of really delicious, inexpensive, microwavable meals that encompass most if not all of these tips.

• More “real” ingredients, less chemicals: if I’m not at Trader Joe’s, I look for meals that have more of the “real food” ingredients that I recognize, like vegetables and proteins, and less things that I can’t pronounce.

I really hope these are helpful. Please let me know YOUR tips in the comments below! And now, the next time someone attacks you for only cooking with a microwave, you can turn your nose up right back at them and give them a little micro-wave goodbye!