It's not easy to make cooking easy, even if you do have a microwave

Cooking a big batch of something on the weekend to use throughout the week has been around longer than today's meal preppers might suspect. It wasn't even new in 1980 when Litton's Microwave Cooking: Everyday Dinners in Half an Hour suggested it, but making a microwave part of the process was a novelty.

The book offers three "basic" mixes to make in big batches in the microwave, each starring one protein. The first step is to gather the protein, veggies, and seasonings, as in the Basic Beef Mix.

Then microwave the heck out of them. 

Make sure to stir from the bottom up! Or from the top down! Or up and down, in a turbulent motion! (I'm not great with spatial awareness, so the arrows don't really help. Just stir.)

Then once everything is cooked through, divide, freeze until needed, and then defrost so you can add it to a recipe that will make it less immediately apparent that the family is eating the same thing over and over again.

The book recommends classics including spaghetti, chili, and stroganoff, but I'm posting layered casserole because I like the way the food stylist built it in a glass dish so you can see the layers.

Not that they necessarily look attractive, mind you. Kinda looks like somebody just got a little OCD when they scraped food scraps into a baking dish so it would be easier to stack the dirty plates.

The ingredients are pretty straightforward: mashed potatoes, beef mix, vegetable soup, peas, cheese, an egg, and various seasonings.

But the directions go into a lot of detail, with a full six-panel spread to show each step. 

There's a similar setup for Basic Chicken Mix.

This one has the added fun of microwaving bone-in meat and trying to stir it "frequently" during the 35-50 minutes of cooking. (Seems like it might have been easier to just make this one in the conventional oven.)

Then the chicken has to be cooled, removed from the bone, and torn into bite-sized pieces. Basic Chicken Mix is definitely the biggest pain in the ass. 

And then it only makes four freezer-boxes full! The beef makes five. But Basic Chicken Mix can be transformed into dishes including Chicken Pilaf, Chicken Stew with Dumplings, and this vaguely named Chicken Casserole.

At least it's easy enough it doesn't need a whole series of explanatory pictures. Just defrost the chicken mix, cook the veggies, and stir in most of the rest of the ingredients. Top with cheese and bread crumbs near the end.

There's also a Basic Pork Mix, though it seems a bit like an afterthought. It only makes three freezer-boxes' worth of mix.

And there are only three total recommendations for meals to make with it: Pork Chop Suey, Pork and Sauerkraut, and this gooey creation. 

That might look really good if the cheese were actually browned...

Midwesterners need not worry about the Pork & Refried Beans Enchiladas, as the recipe was clearly developed for people with zero heat tolerance.

Yes, the filling has some chili powder and a smidge of Tabasco sauce, but it should be more than counterbalanced by the slathering of white sauce and the Monterey Jack and Cheddar toppings.

The most notable part of all these recipes might be that they show just how much of a lie the subtitle of "Everyday Dinner in Half an Hour" is. Even if we completely ignore the time taken to make the mixes on weekends (which by itself can take nearly an hour for the chicken variation) because that's the prep part, the remaining cooking for the busier nights still often pushes past the half-hour limit if your microwave is on the slower side. Hell, the Layered Casserole is almost guaranteed to go over, as the best-case scenario is 29-1/2 minutes (8 for defrosting the mix, 21-1/2 for the remaining microwave steps)-- and this doesn't count things like making the mashed potatoes, layering the ingredients, rotating the pan if needed....

I guess my point of this overstuffed post is that lying to cooks about how quickly they can make recipes is a time-honored tradition-- nearly as time-honored as saying that cooking will be easier if you just get a lot of it done over the weekend. There's always a willful ignorance pretending some of the steps don't exist.