Nuke It

Nothing has revolutionized modern cooking the way microwaves have.

It used to be that we had to punch in the time we wanted to nuke our food: 2 (minutes) ... 2 (twenty) ... 7 (seconds). But most microwaves nowadays have an easy one-minute button; with just one press, your food instantly warms for 60 seconds. Some (like mine) even have a +30s button. And adapting to this convenience, a lot of people now just round their cook times up/down to the nearest minute and repeatedly press the button to that amount.

But what if you want to warm something for an odd or exact amount of time? Like making 3tbsp of melted butter, or softening up a flour tortilla? Only takes 10s or so. I find that I always press the +30s and figure, "I'll stop it at 0:20." and I have to keep an eye on that time while I tend to other kitchen work in the meantime. More often than not, I get carried away and end up cooking the stuff for 15s, or even completely letting the 30s lapse! And yet, I don't know why I still insist on doing it this way (besides the fact that I'm stubborn in my ways).

But this got me to thinking about how "convenient" these buttons really are. I mean, how many people have overcooked foods in the microwave (or cooked longer than they intended, even if the food didn't come out overcooked), because they opted to save on keypresses in the beginning, and didn't watch their nuclear edibles?