Just had my first failure of trying to resuscitate the freezer-burned old food I had stashed away, with a Stouffer’s Balsamic Chicken entree. It came out with one strip of really tough freezer-burned potatoes, and a cold spot at the bottom of the potatoes, which led to one edge of the chicken patty being cooler than it should have been.
I suspect the problem is that this one had it really bad for moisture having crystallized out onto the plastic film, and I cooked this one in microwave mode instead of oven mode. The water just escaped as steam, and then the potatoes were too dry to pick up enough microwave energy. (The tough strip was probably unsalvageable, though.)
I suspect it would have turned out better if I’d cooked it in oven mode, giving heat more time to penetrate and maybe reabsorb some of the lost moisture. I’ll have to stick to that for the rest of them.