Honest. I don't own a microwave.

Now, I have tried things prepared in a microwave. That experience has taught me to fix a quick salad and cold cuts. Even water boiled in one of those things tastes flat. Bleah.

Omlettes on the stove top -- add cheese, maybe vegetables or salsa or diced peaches with a little sugar. Fresh fruit and cheese. Whole wheat toast with cream cheese and blueberry preserves. Real oatmeal boiled in a pot with real almonds and real cinnamon and real honey (five minutes, I promise you, and nothing like that atrocious stuff in the packets). Stir-fried vegetables with chicken strips and cashews. Noodles with cheesy white sauce -- also easy to make, now that grated cheese comes in bags -- and tiny peas. Sweetened sliced strawberries over drop biscuits (10 minutes! not including the time it takes to preheat the oven or toaster-oven). Chicken tenders floured, seasoned and browned in half olive oil, half vegetable oil, with onions and carrots, deglazing the pan with an exotic vinegar to make a quick sauce, and then cook with baby bella mushrooms, covered, for five minutes -- half an hour total, tops.

Desserts ought to be cooked or baked by hand anyway, imho. The anticipation is half the fun -- the kitchen smells so good! -- and it's much harder to eat layer cake every day when you have to bake it from scratch. Same for pie, times 10, but oh, that crust!

Every year for Thanksgiving Story Time, I make baggies of popcorn for the children, served with apple juice. (Popcorn for the Native Americans, and apples for the Europeans.) One-third cup corn, shaken in a pot over the burner with a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil, and then salted right out of the pot -- nothing else. I can do 30 servings, including putting it in bags, in roughly an hour. Every year, parents ask me what kind of microwave popcorn it is, because it's sooooo good, and every year I tell them that it takes less than 10 minutes to make it with a pot that has a lid and a heat source. It's not me that makes it good. I'm not that much of a cook. It's the ingredients. They're real, and no extra flavor enhancements are needed.

Mmmmuch better. Doesn't take that much longer. Well, rice does, but couscous will substitute, and that practically cooks itself.

And I don't have to worry about sodium poisoning from all the salt.