Issue #93: Air fryers, and the lure of speeding up the process

Sometimes things just take as long as they take.

I have recently entered into a satisfying relationship – one I can easily imagine becoming long-term. My routine is more or less the same: work, grocery-buying, mealtimes, exercise. And yet it’s all enhanced: my mind brimming with possibilities, the everyday elevated. We may be in the middle of November, but someone’s turned up the brightness for me – and my immediate world appears in technicolour.

The relationship is, of course, with a Ninja air fryer. A purchase I made both belatedly (after the initial hype) and prematurely, with a fortnight to go until the consumer-frenzy of Black Friday. And yet it’s so quickly integrated itself into my live-alone lifestyle that I have no regrets.

Like any new relationship, there are teething issues. The kale I not so much ‘crisped’ as cremated for brunch. The watermelon-seed sized burn on my bottom lip, earned from taste-testing a steaming cube of sweet potato. The questionable decision I made earlier this week: to traverse London during the Monday evening rush hour, just for an hour in its company before I had to go out again.

Like many, I was lured to the air fryer by its twin promises of speed and ease. Last night, I made a delicious dinner of pesto-topped salmon, halloumi, butternut squash and broccoli in less than 20 minutes. I have no doubt I could cook the same meal in my oven. The trouble is, I often don’t – defaulting to tuna pasta, microwave meals or even takeout from the chicken schwarma place around the corner more regularly than I care to admit.

Somewhere inside my capitalism-addled brain, I’ve made a judgement call that 30 minutes, or however long that process takes using the oven, is too long. I know it’s only 10 minutes longer than the air fryer (perhaps 15 after I’ve pre-heated the oven). Logic, I’m afraid, doesn’t get a look-in here, nor do the opinions of chefs Jay Rayner and James Martin, both of whom refuse to endorse the rise and rise of air fryers.

Somehow, this shiny new gadget has got me hooked on its promise that faster is better – and no amount of cremated kale, first-degree burns or frantic rushing around the Capital can deter me. You can stick to your inefficient ovens and pans – I’m cheating death!

As it happens, the place I had to get to last Monday was the Southbank Centre, where I went to hear this year’s Booker Prize nominees read extracts from their shortlisted novels. Surveying the six nominees on stage, I found myself wondering about their ages. That’s something I doubt I would have done five years ago. I’m not particularly old, but I’m also at the age when I find myself frothing at the mouth when I hear of anyone achieving anything spectacular below the age of 30. Not the most palatable of personality traits, I know – it’s just how it is.

Another reason, perhaps, for my age-obsession in this arena is that I’ve spent the past however-many years writing a debut novel of my own. And, unlike my air-fried home cooking, I’ve found no method of expediting this process.

Nor can I even quantify the progress I’m making. Well-meaning friends and family ask me how close I am to completion, or many words I’ve written that day. I answer the best I can, knowing at the same time that I completed a 100,000 word draft this time last year, which I then all but discarded.

While many women, and perhaps to a lesser degree men, around my age feel a ticking clock to procreate, I feel a ticking clock of my own with this apparently interminable project. Lately, it’s as if I’m looking for a number to legitimise that sense of urgency.

What age do I have to do this by?

Last Monday, I felt reassured to observe that the majority of nominees were at least middle-aged, with all but one aged between 49 and 67 years old (I’ve since learnt that the median average age to win the Booker Prize is 51 years old).

Then I looked up the age of the anomalously-young nominee: debut novelist Yael van der Wooden (whose novel The Safe Keep was the one that intrigued me most, incidentally). She is 37 years old. That calmed me, too. Perhaps it wasn’t too late for me, if only I motored on with it (two years of writing + two-year publishing process = a Booker-nominated literary debut at 37!).

Ah, but then I fell down a rabbit hole, discovering that Wooden’s fellow nominee Rachel Kushner, now aged 56, won a US National Book Award with her debut novel, Telex From Cuba back in 2008. Which she published aged – tense pause while I calculated – 39.

Phew. That, too, I could emulate, thanks to the National Book Awards’ dropping of the US citizen requirement earlier this year (if you’re wondering, my calculation is three years of writing + two-year publishing process + two-year buffer to get a US book deal – ta da!).

These are absurd thoughts, rendered more absurd when I remind myself that I’ve never actually aspired to win a Booker Prize or its American equivalent, nor do I write or read much of the kind of high-literary fiction that tends to qualify.

If I really wanted to beat myself up, I’d close my eyes and recall the following novels written by one-time baby novelists:

• This Side of Paradise when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 23

• White Teeth was published when Zadie Smith was 24

• Conversations with Friends when Sally Rooney was 26

• A Pale View of Hills when Kazuo Ishiguro was 27

I’d think about how, when The X Factor first aired on television, the Overs category (read: the OAPs of the pop music world) was aged 25 and above.

Alternatively, I could remind myself that the average age to become a debut novelist is 36. That Kushner’s National Book Award winning debut took her seven years to write, a similar timeline to many of the novels I’ve loved over the past few years (Lessons in Chemistry, Cleopatra & Frankenstein, Sorrow & Bliss).

That’s not to say it has to take that long, or even that little time. Simply to say that these milestones occur at different times for different people, like how my mother assured me as a potato-faced teen that I’d eventually develop the cheekbones possessed by my more elegant classmates, and lo and behold aged 33 I have them (she neglected to mention the grey hairs but we’ll forgive her for that).

Unlike my air-fried dinners, sometimes things just take as long as they take.

Reading…

In contrast to the theme of this newsletter, I have a speed read recommendation for you: Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy. It’s a heartwarming and strangely-profound novel about a lonely 83-year-old woman and her life-changing friendship with a mouse, and it is a ‘speed read’ on account of 1) its relative brevity (240 pages) and 2) the fact you won’t want to put it down.

Listening…

Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ podcast, Wiser Than Me, is back for season 3! I kicked off my listening with her interview with Schitts’ Creek star Catherine O’Hara.