5 dishes, 40 minutes, 4 Parallel Timix Timers
Problem
I love cooking. I resent how long it takes.
One dish, one timer: fine. Three dishes, three timers: my kitchen is an airport tower. Beep. Beep.
Which one? Wet hands, wrong screen, dismissed the wrong thing. Broccoli goes grey while I stand there holding a floury phone.
Have you ever been in that situation?
Everybody says a tasty dish is made with love. It is not. A tasty dish is made with perfect timing. In this post I show you how.
Prerequisites
Timix runs on iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS.
Next you’ll need one Timix timer per dish. A Timix timer is a named sequence of timers, and each timer can fire triggers at its start and at its end.
Salmon is the simple one — preheat oven, then cook:
- 🐟 salmon in the oven — Preheat oven to 200/180 – 10 min, then ready in 16 min. 26 minutes in total.
Pasta runs longer, because it wants mixing so it does not stick:
- 🍝 Pesto Pasta — boil water 7 minutes, then 9 minutes of boiling broken into three 3 minute mixing pasta timers, then heating the sauce 1m30s. 17m30s minutes in total.
The pesto sauce is shop-bought. It is a Tuesday, not an audition. Swap any of it — chicken for salmon, rice for pasta. The dishes are slots. Only Pesto Pasta template here requires Timix Premium.
Steps
1. Start everything at once. I start the oven, the salmon and broccoli timers together, then wash and cut everything while the water heats.
2. Let each dish call you. When the water boils the stalks go in; when the oven is hot the salmon and mushrooms go in; when the broccoli is done I lift it out and boil the pasta in the same water. A pause trigger on a timer’s end stops the sequence until I resume it, so nothing runs ahead while my hands are full.
3. Reuse the water. The pasta template’s boil water step is already spent, so I skip it.
4. Fill the gaps with the salad. While the oven dishes and the pasta finish, I make a salad or wash up. The salad has no template on purpose — it can be abandoned mid-slice, so whatever countdown calls next wins.
Verification
- 4 timers run at the same time, each with its own Live Activity, and the Timers tab badge shows how many are running.
- Each template ends on a different sound — kettle whistle, level up, call bell, bell — so I know which dish is calling without looking.
- Pause or resume from the wrist with a Double Tap, or with a nose when both hands are busy.
About 40 minutes door to table, while the timers themselves run about 26. The gap is the washing up.
Common Pitfalls
Same sound on every dish. Four identical chimes tell you nothing, and you pick up the phone every time. Better still, use text to speech, so the alert says out loud which dish is calling.
My oven is not your oven. Use these templates as a starting shape and edit the durations.
Closing
5 dishes, 1 dinner, nothing overcooked. You do not need more hands to cook well. You need timing — food only goes wrong when it burns or sits in water long after it was ready.
Here they are. Steal them. Tap one on a device with Timix installed and the template imports straight in.
Or take the files, if you would rather see what you are importing first.
Importing one looks like this:
Learn more about Timix https://aigarden.uk/timix
or
(opens on Mac too)
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