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I feel like I can cook pretty decently. I'm not going to be impressing anyone with my foods, but I can follow just about any recipe we've had a Hello Fresh subscription for a while now. I can sometimes come up with my own creations. A few days ago I made a Quiche that turned out pretty well. The crust I made low carb by using Keto flour. Added Bacon and Sauteed Onions to it, because that was the spare stuff I had in the fridge that fit with a quiche.
I got an air fryer for Christmas, which has been pretty fun. Looking forward to roasting some veggies with it.
I've heard rumors that an air fryer is basically that one mode on the oven which I never use, which is oven + heavy air recirculation. (always paranoid it's just going to make stuff extra dry)
The rumors are true, but a they are particularly competent convection ovens. A lot of ovens are pretty shit and their size makes their job a lot harder.
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Bah! Meal kits. I understand there are a lot of positives, but always my impression is that the person getting it is too lazy to go shopping themselves and they end up paying a premium for it. That being said, the one guy I know who gets a meal kit gets quite the variety. I was jealous of the tonkatsu package he got this week.
Air fryers are great. Ours handily replaced the George Foreman grill we were using previously to quickly cook up some meat for sandwiches and stuff. The thing I like to do best with the one we have that's like this is just throw in a pork tenderloin with seasoned salt, but it's been a while since I used that one at all. I used the other one we have just last night to finish off some sausages that I had partially grilled, but had run out of gas in the middle of cooking.
All that to say: good purchase! Lots of utility. The one that resembles a toaster oven gets more use from me, just because it's basically a lower cost oven that costs less to use if you're cooking less food.
This is explicitly why we like the meal kits. Reduces the amount of shopping we need to do. And yes we pay a premium over doing our own shopping, but from experience we actually just order out more rather than shop more. So it still saves us money.
Ultimately that's what made meal kits worth it when I was alone: I'm low maintenance and I don't care too much about myself, so if I have a choice between having to shop and then choosing what to eat and finally cooking a good homemade meal and ordering out/eating frozen dishes, I'll go with the easy option. Meal kits are a good halfway option where the agonizing decisions are taken care of, there's no having to manage what to buy, trying to find out what to do with leftovers, etc... Not making your meal kit is a massive waste so you DO make it, and don't order takeout. But now that my wife lives with me we don't use them. The economies of scale are a bit better with "normal groceries" for two than for one. There's some recipes and cooking tricks I learned from meal kits I've integrated in my cooking though.
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They're difficult to get right, but my favourite veggies to roast in the air fryer are broccoli and cauliflower, lightly coated in olive oil. You will really have to watch them the first time you do it though, because half a minute is the difference between delicious crunchiness and weirdly textured cardboard. On my air fryer they take 4.5 minutes at 200°c though, to give you a guide.
My least favourite veggies to cook in the air fryer are sweet potatoes - they just dry out too much. Imo the secret to good roasted sweet potato is charring - when the entire outside edge is black, but the centre is still moist and soft to touch, each piece is like candy, it is easily my favourite roasted vegetable in the oven. But oven cooking them is easy as - to make things easiest on myself I peel the sweet potato and then slice it into finger width circles, bang them in a freezer bag with sunflower oil and coat them, then lay them out on a tray and whack them in the oven at 190°c for about 45 minutes. When I pull them out they should be black around the edges and just dry enough in the centre that they aren't sticking to the baking paper - perfection. But in the air fryer they are constantly being blasted with air, so they seem to start to dry out before they're even cooked all the way through.
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