I eat a lot of frozen entrées. I usually look through the cooking directions. Given the amount of money I spent on the entrée, and the amount of effort I’m planning to spend cooking (given that I bought an all-in-one frozen thingie in the first place), the conventional cooking directions seem unnecessary.
Consider tonight’s dinner, the kofta curry from Tandoor Chef. The microwave directions are pretty simple: heat 3 minutes, stir, heat 2 minutes, eat.
Conventional instructions, on the other hand, say: preheat oven for 15 minutes, heat for 20 minutes, eat.
I don’t think there’s much difference in the end result, given the 2 cooking methods. The biggest difference is that one takes you 5 minutes, the other takes you 35 minutes. Given how close most people live to a Wal-Mart, a Best Buy, or even a CVS pharmacy (all of which sell microwave ovens), you could almost certainly buy a microwave and cook with it faster than you could follow the conventional instructions. That’s assuming you’re in a place where you already have an oven and could follow those instructions if you wanted to. Just go to the store, pick up the smallest oven they have, come home, nuke the food, and pack the oven back up. You might even be able to return it for a refund and be home within the 35 minutes, depending on how close you live.