What’s new at our house includes the air fryer my daughter Jess bought me for a surprise Valentine’s Day present.
It turns out that it’s requiring lots more thought than I expected it to including where to put it. In fact, even that was a problem given the lay-out of our kitchen in our house built in the late 1940’s and added onto sometime before 1960 before the microwave started becoming popular in 1967 and wildly popular by 1975. My daughter and I soon learned that if we ran the toaster and the microwave at the same time, we would pop a circuit breaker and the lights would go out in the kitchen.
So, we wanted to avoid loading up the rather limited outlets in the kitchen and ended up moving Mr. Coffee out of his place on the counter by the door to the family room where he’d long ruled to the other counter next to the narrow door to the hall to the front bathroom and bedrooms. And of course, the coffee bean grinder, the jar of coffee beans, the filters, and the two Brita water carafes had to go there, too. Mr. Coffee and the grinder now have an outlet a piece. Still, I ended up tweaking that arrangement when I realized that the jar of beans logically needs to sit next to the grinder not on the other side of Mr. Coffee by the water carafes.
As for our new 16” wide, 14” high, 14” deep shiny behemoth that bakes, toasts, grills, and dehydrates fruits and veggies in addition to air frying . . . We parked it at the end of the counter by the door to the family room. A plus: there’s no cabinet above it and it has plenty of room to breathe in air on the sides and blow it out in the exhaust in the back. But plugging it in had issues. The maker of our air flyer gave it a super short cord that doesn’t actually reach to the outlet by the kitchen window above the sink. So, we had to plug in the power strip we’d used for Mr. Coffee and the grinder. We also plugged in the electric can opener that Jess bought me to replace the hand-cranked openers I had trouble with due to the arthritis in my fingers.
We also had to move some things. For example, we no longer had room for the Rolodex, coupons, grocery lists, and pencil cups on the counter, so we moved them into my dad’s old desk in the family room. To have a parking place for hot food, we moved the cutting board we used to keep by the sink over to the left of the air fryer and got out our extra cutting board for the spot close to the sink.
We spent quite a bit of time the day we got our air fryer educating ourselves about it. We read the Air Fryer + Oven Quick Start and User Guides. We perused the air fryer cookbook that I bought when I went to the store that day. I sent out a call to my Facebook friends for tips and recipes. Some of them happily obliged. Soon I discovered that an air fryer doesn’t actually fry. It works by sucking moisture out of food. We also found out that air fryers get so hot that probably we should cook our favorite dishes for less time and at lower temperatures than our old recipes stipulate.
The day after we got the air fryer, we tried it out, And, sure enough, we discovered that the medium setting makes toast too dark for us. (Our old finicky toaster-oven hasn’t been the same since one morning the toast caught fire. It was an alarming sight to see flames stand up in the back of that toaster. “Shut the door,” Jess shouted. And when I did, the flames went out for lack of oxygen. We banished that toaster, with its permanently darkened front door, to the room next to the kitchen from which it might depart on our next Trash Day.)
Using our cookbook, we’ve made tasty chicken tenders and a breakfast frittata. I did learn that really you should choose the lower of the baking times suggested by your cookbook after I cooked the mozzarella cheese bites an extra two minutes and the cheese oozed out all over the air fry basket and the bake pan below.
I’ll do better next time. And I must say that this old girl enjoys learning new tricks at her advanced age.
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Also new from Juliet: trade paperbacks of the expanded edition of Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel and of Cinderella, P. I. First Case to Last. Both cost $9.99 exclusively from Amazon and have easy-on-the-eyes 14-point font.
If you prefer digital versions, they’re available wide from a large range of retailers including for Novel Basics
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/u3fmrjku
Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/4jd9a9w3
Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/3zr54p6k
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yetuh8bc
And for Cinderella, P. I., First Case to Last
Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/327m8md2
Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/uutf6ud8
Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/mvch3err
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/2p9fdhj2
Until next time, all the best, Juliet