Good morning. It’s gadget week here at NYT Cooking as Melissa Clark weighs in, not super-favorably, on the uses and merits of countertop air fryers. (Me, I’ve got a no-recipe recipe for split-pea soup cooked in an electric pressure cooker.)
Melissa went down the air fryer rabbit hole a few months ago, acquiring one after consulting with our colleagues on Wirecutter. (They recently tested their way to finding “The Best Air Fryer [But We Don’t Recommend It].”) Then she started cooking, talking to experts, reading cookbooks and tweaking recipes, then cooking some more. I won’t cheat you out of the joy of reading her opinion, but I will say Melissa’s quite generous to those who might actually like the machine.
Indeed, she developed three air-fryer recipes expressly for them: for French fries; for chicken wings (above); and for brussels sprouts. What more does anyone need?
Maybe some split-pea soup? You can’t make it in an air fryer, but I made a 60-minute homage to the one that used to be served at Roberta’s in Brooklyn, and I think you can, too. All you need: A pound of dried, rinsed split peas; two smoked pig trotters or hocks or turkey wings or necks; a chopped carrot; a chopped onion; a bay leaf; the better part of a tallboy (I used Narragansett lager) and a little less than a quart of water. I sautéed the onion and carrot in some fat in the bottom of the pot, then added everything else and set the machine to 45 minutes, high pressure. The manual release whizzed the peas into a thick purée, the Greek yogurt of soups. I stripped meat from the trotters and put it back into the pot. Then served it with a baguette and some salted butter, and when the children had ripped through it all, I was bowing like Hugh Jackman at a curtain call. At least in my mind!
Do you want an actual recipe? I like this Alison Roman number for slow-roasted salmon with citrus and an herb salad, because it can make a midweek dinner taste like one you’d eat not just on a weekend, but on vacation, in some place you’d like to live forever, where surely you’d eat this way all the time.
Also, have you made three-cup chicken lately? Try it tonight with wild shrimp, why don’t you, and see how something delicious can be made more so, or differently?
I like Melissa’s recipe for coconut red curry with tofu as a midweek dinner, as I do this tuna salad Tejal Rao learned from Scarlett Lindeman, of the restaurant Cicatriz, in Mexico City. Tejal brought it to us as a when-it’s-too-hot-to-cook recipe. But I like it as much as a don’t-really-want-to-cook recipe. It’s powerfully good.
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Now, stop what you’re doing and read this ripping Kim Severson yarn about Matt Lee and Ted Lee’s new book on the cutthroat, super-stressful world of professional catering.
And if you’ll indulge a long stroll away from the kitchen? I’m enjoying the intersection of adolescent rage and competence porn in the series “HANNA,” on Amazon Prime.
Closer to home, I thought Lucas Kwan Peterson’s April Fools’ column for the food section of The Los Angeles Times was fun and clever. And I loved the tweet they used to unveil it.
There’s a new Son Volt single, “Devil May Care,” in which Jay Farrar’s sounding like Jay Farrar and that, to me, is comforting.
Finally, do read this delightful story by Ligaya Mishan on the actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, who at 85 has embraced a new role: as a gangster granny in the Queens rapper Mr. Cardamom’s new video, “Nani.” Life is beautiful. I’ll be back on Friday.
