I finally gave in and got an air fryer - but I refuse to use it!

You know the kind of person who gets every new gadget the very minute they hit the market?

I’m not that person.

But I am surrounded by people who are.

Everybody said we should get an air fryer. Everybody had one.

I was beyond disinterested.

All the excitement around air-fryers when they went mainstream, oh, I don’t know, two years ago left me cold.

I recalled the fervour and frenzy generated around microwaves when they were the latest hot ticket somewhere back in the late ’80s.

At the time, I had a friend who married a man with pots of money. She was one of the first people I knew to get a microwave.

I stayed at hers one Saturday night.

She said she was doing a joint for the lunch on Sunday.

In the microwave.

Next morning, before we went to Mass, my friend put the meat into the microwave and, with a flourish, pressed a button to set it rotating.

When we came back from Mass, the meat was still rotating.

Eventually, after some checking she said it was done.

My friend took what appeared to me to be a still deathly-pale lump of pork out of the microwave.

Next, she picked up a small brush and a container of some sort of liquid and painted the meat brown. The stuff in the container, she informed me, was a special kind of colourant designed to give the meat the “traditional look of a roast”.

At the time I was young, wild and unmarried; I didn’t care a fig about cooking. But I was unsettled by the deeply unhealthy look of meat cooked in this expensive new-fangled cooker. I didn’t eat any.

Maybe that’s what’s at the root of my deep and enduring suspicion of any kind of pioneering cooking gadget.

So I listened politely when people enthused about how air-fryers are more economical to use than a traditional oven, how they are time efficient, how they may be a healthier way of cooking, potentially lower in calories, and may preserve nutrients better than traditional methods.

When someone commented that air fryers are a very good alternative to a deep-fat fryer I confessed that I had never owned, nor ever wished to own, a deep-fat fryer.

Time wore on. After a while everybody had one. And everybody was telling us we should get an air-fryer.

My husband thought it was a great idea and said I needed to open my mind to new inventions and new concepts.

Don’t get me wrong; the man has no interest in cooking.

He just loves gadgets.

Eventually, of course, despite my stone-walling we got one.

The box was enormous.

Mumbling vaguely, I shoved it away out of sight down in the spare bedroom.

Just for a while, like.

Until, like, I had a chance to sort out space for it in the kitchen.

“There is space,” my husband said.

The box stayed in the spare room for a month, two months, three.

Just as my husband started to forget about it, a friend – who is an excellent cook, has an air fryer and regularly uses it for all sorts of things – came to visit.

First chance he got, of course, Cunning Colin mentioned that we too had now invested in an air fryer.

My friend looked around the kitchen.

“Where is it?” she asked.

She couldn’t see it.

Had I maybe put it in the utility room?

Small wonder she couldn’t see it, commented Treacherous Terry; ‘twas still sitting in its box in the spare bedroom.

My friend gave me a long, knowing, tough-love look.

I hadn’t sorted out a space for it yet, I argued weakly.

“A good start would be taking it out of the box and seeing where it would fit,” she said briskly.

“I know where it would fit,” said Perfidious Peter. Ever so brightly.

In the end, the thing was removed from its box and a place was quickly found for it.

“Look there’s even a cookbook with it,” they said as I bristled with irritation.

Of course there was.

I said nothing.

My friend suggested I sign up for one of the free Further Education and Training Courses on ‘How to use an Air Fryer’.

Really, she said, jokes aside, they did classes on it.

I gave her a look and she buttoned it.

The sight of it sitting there with its fancy gold handles and its state-of-the-art control panel made me actually vibrate with dislike.

One day, I lifted the Instruction Booklet between my thumb and forefinger and looked at the pages of information about what the Max Crisp function was, what crisper plates were, and what the buttons for air fry, roast, bake, reheat, dehydrate and prove did if you pressed them.

I called Faithless Frank in from the shed and gestured to two pork chops, some peeled potatoes, a bowl of mixed vegetables and the Air Fryer Recipe Book.

“Away with you,” I said coldly.

He tossed his head airily.

“Await the single most fabulous meal of your life,” he declared, nose in the air.

Lack of confidence has never been his problem.

He put the pork chops into a plastic bowl.

Following a recipe in the Air Fryer Recipe Book, he showily mixed up a rub of parmesan, garlic, onion powder, smoked paprika, salt and pepper and coated the chops.

Then he put the plastic bowl with the coated pork chops in it into one of the two drawers in the air fryer and turned it to 190 degrees.

The plastic bowl immediately began to disintegrate.

A horrible stench poured out between the gold handles.

Much howling and kerfuffling ensued.

A little knowledge, as they say, is truly a dangerous thing.