-by Frank Macdonald
Once, as a kid, I watched a cowboy on the screen of the Victoria Theatre make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. My own efforts to repeat that trick…well, fortunately I had no fish to fry.
That ancient memory came back to me this week when a cousin brought me a gift…I think it was a gift…of an air fryer. It might have been a nasty trick she was playing. Nothing to it, apparently. Put something, say you have fish to fry, into its oven-ish looking interior, press a few buttons and, presto, you have plateful of something the doctor probably didn’t order.
It’s not my first air fryer. I fried one a couple of years ago that was a gift from another relative. For all I know this one currently in my kitchen may be the recycled reincarnation of the first one.
The original air fryer worked really well until it wouldn’t work at all. I thought maybe I could fix it but the thing was so well riveted together I couldn’t get inside it with the Jaws of Life. But my experience with that one made me certain that I would have no trouble air frying my menu of the day in the new one. My menu that day happened to be a very fat free few ounces of strip loin, medium rare, salad on the side.
My two-year-old air fryer might as well have been two hundred years old. We live in an age now when technology is no longer technology. We have passed the point where any human can fix (or is allowed to fix) a technological glitch. Repair shops have gone the way of video stores. And all the knowledge I had learned from my original air fryer was about as useful to me as those high school algebra exams I used to fail.
I prepped my steak and began to think like a chef about the mouth-watering joy of it. Not that I was starting with a major meal. I gave myself some personal training, figuring out how to make toast and toast bagels, both edible adventures. So I felt I was ready for some serious kitchen barbecuing.
There was a button that said toast/bagels but no button that said medium rare steak. At least this air fryer came with an old fashioned booklet. I was afraid It might just give me a www. address. I bought a smart watch that gave me that advice once upon a time. I tried, but to cut a long story short, the watch is still in its box on the bedroom bureau waiting for me to make it tick.
The booklet might as well have been a www. address. It seemed to be filled with assumptions that I could fill in the blank spots which I think should have been spelled out. In English, not some foreign translation carried out by some form of alternative intelligence.
Pre-heat the oven! How do I do that? Rub two sticks together?
Push enough buttons and if you don’t launch yourself into outer space you will eventually see the digital window say Pre-H. That’s what it said but nothing seemed to be happening. Meanwhile my more than ready for the air fryer steak was marinating in a mixture of my own invention. It actually may have been drowning it had been there so long.
Meanwhile, I continued with my education. Now the air fryer was fluctuating between Fahrenheit and Celsius. I used to be well versed in Fahrenheit before the country began playing head games with its citizens by deciding to go metric. Now I am barely literate in either language.
While I settled on a temperature, the air fryer seemed not to understand the angst and anguish of human hunger. It refused to rise to the occasion, the occasion being my supper.
I, or the booklet, must have missed a step. I opened the oven door and stuck my hand in, touching nothing to avoid a third-degree ambush and an ambulance. There is more heat in this house during a January power failure. I was obviously missing something. I began to wonder if a person could toast a steak.
Inevitably I reached the breaking point. Or the point beyond which I dared not travel lest I break another air fryer. The state I was in by this time was one my old golf instructor called “not a teachable moment!” It’s hard to teach someone anything when his eight iron is at the bottom of a swamp.
But my past is littered with teachable moments, and at this moment I remembered another moment. That was a cooking trick that my father once taught me. It involved a kitchen stove, a cast iron frying pan and generous pat of butter. To quote the other fellow, “In a few moments I was cooking with gas!”
The steak-and-salad was deliciously satisfying. I waved the empty plate in front of the air fryer, hoping it would catch onto what it was I expected from it. So it sits on the kitchen counter silently watching me, knowing that come tomorrow, it will be day filled with teachable moments, one of which may actually teach me something.