Easily oxidizable oxides, FeO, and MnO, are unstable in air but can be easily stabilized by small amounts of other oxides. Further these two unstable oxides stabilize each other very well. Such stabilized FeO and MnO provide easy and reproducible methods of preparing electronic ceramics that need such unstable valency states in them. Ferrous-zinc ferrite has been successfully synthesized employing FeO stabilized with a small amount of Fe3O2.