All Things Air Fryer

In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel Your Body, Mind and Soul, Martha and Peter discuss the versatility and convenience of air fryers, share their experiences with meal planning, and explore various cooking techniques. They emphasize the importance of flexibility in meal preparation and encourage listeners to experiment with air fryer recipes, highlighting the ease of cooking vegetables and proteins. The conversation also touches on the benefits of component cooking and how to make meal prep less stressful.

Key Takeaways

Air fryers are versatile and can be used for various cooking methods.
Meal planning can be flexible and doesn’t have to be rigid.
Component cooking allows for quick meal assembly with prepped ingredients.
Experimenting with air fryer recipes can lead to delicious meals.
Using an air fryer can reduce cooking time and cleanup.
It’s beneficial to have a variety of ingredients on hand for meal prep.
Roasting vegetables in the air fryer can enhance their flavor.
Don’t be afraid to check on your food while cooking in the air fryer.
Leftovers can be easily reheated in the air fryer without losing crispiness.
Cooking in the air fryer can be a fun and creative process.

All Things Air Fryer Podcast

Video Transcript

Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is Peter, my partner and my brother.

Peter Morrison (00:14)
Hello, how are you?

Martha McKinnon (00:16)
I’m good, how you doing?

Peter Morrison (00:18)
Good, thank you.

Martha McKinnon (00:22)
So today we’re going to talk about all things air fryer. Back when we decided to launch this podcast, we reached out to our readers and solicited ideas and questions for topics. And air fryer came up several times, people wanting to know about how to use the air fryer, looking for air fryer recipes. We’ve both become fans of the air fryer, so I thought it would be fun for us to share our experience, to share how we’re using our air fryers, what we’ve learned about them. But before we dive in, what’s going well in your world? What are you happy about?

Peter Morrison (01:00)
I’m happy to report that we’re now on podcast number 35, which is good, good for us. And I’ve been, I’m not really a meal planner per se, but I’ve always struggled with dinner. Dinner’s always been like a challenge for me because I tend to work right up till dinner time and then not really have a plan necessarily. So I’ve been trying to do more like use more your idea of component meal prepping and meal planning, just to have various ingredients at the ready so that when dinner time rolls around and you’re ready to eat, you can just sort of pick and choose and pull a meal together relatively quickly and painlessly, depending on what I feel like having – which has always been one of my personal issues with meal planning is I just don’t always know what I’m gonna feel like at any given meal on any given day. So just kind of weird that way.

Martha McKinnon (02:33)
I don’t think you’re weird. I think a lot of people probably share that. Don’t count yourself as weird. A lot of people say like, how can I possibly know and plan what I’m going to want? You know, because there’s so many variables. What’s the weather going to be like? What did I have? Maybe I had lunch out or yeah, so plans shift. I think a flexible approach is important so you don’t get locked in.

Peter Morrison (02:58)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martha McKinnon (03:02)
So how is this working for you, this whole component approach where you have a few things ready to go? Is it helping?

Peter Morrison (03:08)
It’s going, it’s good. It still takes a little work and preparation, you know, because it is good to have your quinoa or rice or pasta kind of cooked so that you don’t have to worry about, you know, making that at dinner time.

But what I really like is, you know, buy several vegetables when I grocery shop and maybe have some chicken breasts or chicken tenders, maybe cook them ahead or buy a rotisserie chicken or whatnot and have a, we’re not big beef eaters, so chicken, fish, shrimp.

Sort of have that ready to go. And then it’s just a matter of, do you want to have green beans or do you want to have broccoli or do you want to have pesto? Do you want have red sauce? Do you want to have like a Asiany kind of sesame or keep it simple, put it on a salad? I mean, it’s just a matter of it’s so much easier to pull that together in the moment when I can adjust it based on what I feel like. So it’s going good in that regard, but it’s still work, just not as much work for me.

Martha McKinnon (04:38)
Well, good I’m happy that that’s working because I found it to be very beneficial to just spend a little time on Sunday or throughout the week, you know, cooking, prepping ahead. I love roasted vegetables, so a couple of trays of roasted vegetables. And last week, I did what we love is the onions that mom used to make it, the onions and peppers and potatoes and chunks of Italian sausage all roasted together. So I made a couple of big trays of that. And so we ended up eating it twice. And then I used leftovers to make a soup. And I added kale and broth and turned the leftovers into a soup. And it’s made dinner so much easier.

I intend to use the little bit that’s left and make a frittata. So I’ll chop it up a little more finely, warm it, add some egg and cheese and it’s basically given us almost a whole week of you know food because I like frittata. I don’t tend to eat big breakfasts like that but I love frittata for lunch or dinner. A wedge of frittata just warmed up quick in the microwave (affiliate link) with a simple salad and it’s dinner so so I’m glad that it’s working.

Peter Morrison (05:55)
Mm-hmm. I would put that with scrambled eggs in a wrap and make a nice hearty wrap.

Martha McKinnon (06:03)
Yep, or a hearty wrap. That’s another good idea. So that was a recipe that I just updated, was an old burrito recipe. And it was a combination of mushrooms and lentils and kale mixed with some salsa and some cumin all stirred together and then put on a wrap with a little bit of goat cheese. And it’s so interesting because I happened upon the recipe and it dates back like to 2014 and it definitely needed new pictures and I had totally forgotten about it. We’ve gotten to the point now where we’ve done so many recipes and been doing this so long. It’s fun to go back into the archives and rediscover recipes that you’d forgotten about. So now I have that combination that again can be turned into a wrap. It can be put on some quinoa or some rice. It can be turned into a soup. So again, I just find that it’s just a versatile way to feed yourself, depending on like what you’re gonna want to eat in the moment in case you’re not gonna know many days ahead. So good, I’m glad that’s working. And it really does take us right into the air fryer when you talk about having several, you know, buying several veggies and then just having to cook them off. Do you like cooking veggies in the air fryer?

Peter Morrison (07:20)
Yeah, right now it’s my favorite. I think it’s my favorite thing to cook in the air fryer because I like this, especially with like broccoli and Brussels sprouts, you get like a little charring, which I like and it’s easy to do. It’s, it’s minimal cleanup. You don’t really need a recipe. Just you know, pick your favorite vegetable, spray it with a little oil so the seasoning will stick, you know, mix in whatever you want seasoning wise and then, you know, cook it off and you can easily stop and start it several times while it’s cooking, check on it, check on its doneness.

I have also tried to bake in it, that’s a little trickier for me because like the outside or top will start to overcook and possibly burn and the inside middle’s not really done yet. So that’s a work in progress. I haven’t really, I don’t know that I’ve really cooked chicken in it per se. I mean, it’s good for heating up frozen or precooked, something that’s already cooked that just needs a heating, but yeah, I’d say veggies are by far my favorite.

Martha McKinnon (08:58)
Well, good. I think what I found with the air fryer is it’s helpful to just think of it as like a mini oven that gets hot faster. So it preheats faster. It allows you to cook faster because you’re getting more intensity in a small space. And so instead of thinking about needing special recipes, I think I find it helpful to just think about, what would I typically cook in the oven or even on the stove top? And you haven’t cooked chicken but I’ve had great success with boneless skinless chicken breasts. And I flatten them, you know, just to make sure they’re, you know, an inch or less thick, maybe a half inch thick, just flatten them and I’ve had good success letting them come out to room temperature and then, you know, cooking them in the hot with in the hot air fryer, you know, 360F to 400F degrees.

They cook fast and they’ve been tender and delicious. I like to use Italian seasoning or Penzey’s granulated roasted garlic. I like my the Montreal steak seasoning. There’s so many like seasonings available now and just pull them out. And they’ve been good and quick. And what I love is I don’t have air conditioning. And so I love the fact that it doesn’t heat up the whole house the way turning on my oven does.

So just think about it as anything that I would cook in a skillet, anything I would cook in the oven, under the broiler, on the grill, I can cook in the air fryer. And again, we’re a family of two, and so it’s a perfect size for cooking. The other thing I just tried, green beans. I love green beans. Again, because I like that roasted, I like that charred little bit that they get.

In addition to the broccoli, carrots are another one. Any of the root veggies work well. Roasted, if you mix up carrots and potatoes and onions together and roast them off, they’re delicious. And I like sort of the meal in one where you just, you can cook even side by side. And this was, I learned this tip from a cooking class that I’m taking.

Jules from the Stone Soup offered her Joyful Cooking class at a discount. It’s a three month course and she’s basically teaching people how to cook really, really simply without recipes, which I find so beneficial. Her suggestion is she has different templates, so oven cooking or putting together what you would really call a magic no-cook meal with kind precooked ingredients. Just different templates.

And once she said, just learn the template, and then you can just, again, mix and match. So what she demonstrated in the air fryer, which was really clever, was frozen spinach on one half of the air fryer, and then a frozen salmon filet right beside in the basket. 400F degrees in the air fryer in 10 minutes, both were done perfectly. And then again, just season at will.

Whatever seasoning you might want on your salmon, of course, salt and pepper, but do you want soy sauce? Do you want some type of Asiany, teriyaki? Do you want pesto? So she’s just this big advocate for keeping your meals real simple and just thinking in terms of sauces and garnishes. So that was clever and something that, again, if you’re one or two, it’s just sort of one and done in the air fryer.

If you don’t have an air fryer, again, that’s something you could do on a sheet pan as well. And she did suggest that as the alternative. We have several air fryer recipes on our website, and we can clearly link out to those. But I would just encourage folks who want to use the air fryer to just think about any recipe or any dish that you like making. And like Peter says, don’t be intimidated by it. You can open it, you can close it, you can check on your food. It’s really quick to stop and start again, which is nice.

And so you don’t have to, I think again, like anything, it’s just a matter of working with it, playing with it, experimenting with it. And the more you do that, the easier it gets. And I just keep mine on the counter. It’s just always ready to go. Warming up leftovers, it’s another great device, especially if you want to keep them crispy like a flat bread or pizza or anything like that. It’s a great tool for warming up. And it happens so much more quickly than you if you tried to do that in the oven.

Peter Morrison (13:58)
Mm-hmm. I think the recipe for sheet pan shrimp and broccoli would be really good in the air fryer.

Martha McKinnon (14:08)
Yep, we should probably update that one because you’re right, that would be another good one. And that recipe comes from one of my favorite cookbooks that I go back to again and again where she again, that was one of her sort of templates. This whole concept of doing your vegetable and your protein in a sheet pan in a hot oven. And I’ll go back and look at some of her alternatives too, because maybe it’s time to come up with a post listing all those different things that you could just do in the air fryer real quick and easy with both.

Peter Morrison (14:40)
Mm. Right. I think too, it’s important to remember you don’t have to put them in at the same time. Like I’m thinking this the broccoli shrimp, if your broccoli is fresh, you might want to start that first. And if your shrimp is not frozen, if it’s thawed, it’s only going to need a couple of minutes. So, you know, start your broccoli, get it going when it when it’s halfway done or so.

Martha McKinnon (15:06)
Right. Exactly.

Peter Morrison (15:09)
You know, then you toss in the shrimp and then you could finish it off together. That’s how I would do it.

Martha McKinnon (15:14)
Absolutely, and that very well could be the recipe, you know, even in the oven because you’re right, shrimp would cook more quickly. And so again, that’s something you just want to be mindful of. And it’s like you said, it’s really easy to open the basket and then just add in the ingredient that’s going to take much less time so that you don’t end up with overdone shrimp or if you had a fish fillet that was not, you know, frozen.

Peter Morrison (15:40)
Mm. Mm-hmm. Something else I want to try is like, as a kid, I used to love like a toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Kind of do that in an air fryer, right? Get some good whole grain bread and peanut butter or jelly or like a grilled cheese. Because I love grilled cheese, but I like dry grilled cheese. Like I hate when there’s so much butter or oil in the pan and the sandwich gets, or the bread gets kind of not soggy, but I just like it like dryly toasted. So that’s something that I want to try one of these days I think would be yummy.

Martha McKinnon (16:26)
It’s almost like a toasted cheese, which I think sounds yummy. And if you try that and it works out well, I think it’s another great recipe for the website. Because again, I think a lot of people share that where they don’t like them overly greasy. And sometimes I’ve done just toast with a slice of cheese in the middle. But again, then the cheese doesn’t melt quite as much as you might like. So this could be the perfect solution for toastier bread.

Peter Morrison (16:53)
Mm. And I’ve also seen some people like maybe if you’re cooking a burger in the air fryer, it could be messy, if you want a cheeseburger to put the cheese on. But if you cook the burger till it’s done, right, the air fryer is still hot, then you open it up, put your slice of cheese on, close it up. Don’t turn it back on, but just let the heat that’s already there, just leave it in there for another 30 or 45 seconds and then the cheese gets nice and melty. Again, I haven’t cooked a burger, but it’d be easy enough to do.

Martha McKinnon (17:37)
Yeah, so I think the air fryer is just this wonderful device, especially for smaller families. And I encourage everybody to experiment. We’ll link out to our favorite air fryer recipes and also some of our oven recipes that would be easily, you know, changed up to work in the air fryer. And if anybody listening or watching this has favorite air fryer recipes they’d want to share, we’d love to get that input.

Peter Morrison (18:06)
Most definitely. Thanks everyone, have a wonderful day and we’ll be back soon.

Martha McKinnon (18:15)
Take care.