Hey Good Lookin'

 So. The air fryer.

I was still planning on hemming and hawing and second-guessing myself a little more even after the comments on this post convinced me that I probably would get an air fryer at some point. But then my parents were over for Eve's slightly delayed birthday dinner on Sunday since she was home for break, and my dad asked me if I had an air fryer, and then said "dammit" when I didn't, because he had decided they were getting an air fryer and wanted me to tell them which one to get. While I was looking up the comments on the post to read to him and noodling on the internet at the table, it popped up that Best Buy had the Ninja Max XL on sale for a hundred dollars less than regular price. Suddenly my dad was barking "do it!" and I was ordering two air fryers.

I was a bit apprehensive about finding counter space, but then I always am, and then it invariably turns out that I keep a lot of crap on the counter and even though it seems like that crap really has to live on the counter, it actually really doesn't.

I

 set it up and then might have ended up leaving it sitting there until I screwed up my courage to use it, much like my instant pot, a Black Friday impulse buy that lurked balefully on the counter for a year and a half while two separate friends offered to come over and walk me through how to use it before I threw caution to the winds and pressure cooked some Mongolian beef one madcap Friday night. 

Matt was deep in prep for the Valentine's Day Guys Cook night, but he had also made homemade bread crumbs from a rock-hard baguette (he watches chefs on Youtube and then randomly does stuff, it's mostly cool, sometimes alarming). He had been planning to do some kind of chicken schnitzel while Eve was home but it didn't end up happening, so while he was grocery shopping I was making cilantro lime instant pot chicken for Eve to take back (because the instant pot is my bitch now, I've come so far) and had a leftover chicken breast, which I cut into strips and breaded with his bread crumbs and cooked in the air fryer. And whoo-hoo, I was now a person who fried stuff with air. 

This is my small gallery of air fryer stuff: kale chips, Cuban ham and cheese tarts and maple-chili pork belly bites that I made to go with garlic noodles and broccoli last night. For the foreseeable future, expect me to be obnoxiously air-fryer-positive with the zeal of the newly converted. It's so easy! It's so much less scary than the instant pot! You can open it WHILE IT'S GOING. I love roasted vegetables but I hate heating up the oven for a the small amount I make because leftover roasted vegetables are mushy and gross. It's so easy to work at counter-height! It saves my back!

My parents have only made chicken legs so far, but my dad was half rapturous, half pissed off because he thinks they might even be better than barbecued, and he barbecues in every calendar month (and this is northern Canada, we got weather). The little recipe book that came with it has one for mini cheeseburger meatloaves, which will probably make Angus want an air fryer too. 

Will my enthusiasm inevitably wane? Almost certainly. I am comfortable with this, I have spent more money on dumber things (during lockdown I bought a spaetzle maker. A SPAETZLE MAKER.) 

Our dinner party was fabulous. The guys knocked it out of the park. There was lobster bisque, a salmon poke bowl, beef cheek with escargot and jellied mustard, seared wagyu beef with smoked salmon and peach, and Matt made maple pudding, crepes with maple buttercream and candied prosciutto, maple fudge and maple and bacon glazed pecans and then most of us slipped into a sugar coma (is there such a thing as homi-monoglyceride-cide?)

I'm probably missing stuff, because around course three I took a tiny bottle of vodka from the bathroom emergency box and made Collette do a deconstructed vodka tonic with me and after that things were still delicious but less pronouncable (wtf is kohlrabi anyway). 

Even with all the amazing food, the highlight of the night was probably Cody, Collette's mom's bird who worked the room like a tiny feathered lothario and could have gone home with anyone's wife. Or Dave.