OBSESSIONS

14 June 2021

When I get interested in a new "thing," I usually go overboard. 

I considered buying an air fryer for several weeks.  It seemed like everybody was talking about how much they loved theirs.  I found there was an air fryer attachment for my Instant Pot which was cheaper than an actual air fryer and I thought of getting that.  I didn't order it because Amazon had a sale coming up and I thought I'd wait and see if it went on sale (it didn't).

But in the meantime, I read more comments on air fryers and decided that the Instant Pot version was probably going to be frustrating because of its smaller size, so I convinced myself that if I was going to get anything it would be an regular air fryer.

Then came the day when I was looking at them all again and saw that the Corsori was a "best seller" and was on sale for $20 off, so I did the impulse buy and hit the "buy now" button.  Then I started feeling guilty, not knowing if I would really use it or not.  I confessed to Ned that I bought it and he seemed slightly interested but was concerned about where we were going to put it.

It arrived on Friday and the first thing I did was to try a frozen waffle in it.  Walt laughed that it took 3 minutes in the toaster and 6 in the air fryer, but the difference was that the waffle was actually crisp, which it never is in the toaster (Eggo commercials notwithstanding).

I tried to find other things I could cook.  English muffins came out too crisp and not toasted enough.  I read notes from all sorts of other new owners of air fryers who were afraid to use them, but I leaped in.  The first night I made a chicken dish which, as I reported, wasn't all that good, but mostly because of the spices.  The chicken itself was moist.

Ned decided we'd had too many "meat" dinners in a row and needed pasta yesterday, so I took some leftover mushrooms and made something called Garlicky Mushrooms with lemon.  The mushrooms were too small and toasted more than they should have, but Walt ate most of them.

We have too many overripe bananas, so I made banana bread this morning (it took 5 minutes to mix) and it's delicious.

During the day on Friday, I found lots of YouTube videos and while watching one of them, an ad popped up for a 600 recipe book, which you could get for a set price and could get two other books for free.  It seemed like a great deal, so I ordered it, not realizing that this was a pdf file, not an actual BOOK.

Wouldn't you think this was a real book??  I still can't find somewhere in the ad where it mentions getting it via e-mail but it arrived and I'd paid for it, so I looked through it.

It has lots and lots of recipes, and many are recipes that I want to try.  But they are difficult  to find and get to (since the table of contents does not link to the recipe).

So I spent the better part of the day going through the recipes, one at a time, and copying the ones I wanted to try, moving the recipe to my hard drive and formatting it and then going back to look at the rest of the recipes.  I don't know how many recipes I copied but there are 30 recipes for chicken alone.  I did all the vegetable recipes, and some pork, turkey, appetizer, and bread recipes as well.  I even copied 3 duck recipes.  I've never cooked duck, but the recipes made it sound so easy I decided to try it.

I still have a lot more recipes to go through in the first book and haven't tried the second book yet.  But after hours of moving recipes, I got nervous about losing them, so copied them all down on a flash drive so I have a backup.  The recipes seem so simple that I can make something different every night for months.

And I'm still discovering new videos and am watching them in bits and pieces so I can copy down the recipes that I want to try. 

So yeah, it's a new obsession...but I also think it was a good purchase, and as we learn more about how it all works, both Ned and I are going to become proficient.