I’ve tried air fryers before and been sadly disappointed, but The Widow Badass recommended a particular make and model, and her word is good enough for me. Besides, it’s made by Instant, maker of my beloved Instant Pot, so I laid down the cash and took my chance.
Approved.
It’s honkin’ big, though, especially since it has to be at least 5″ away from anything else.
But it makes great fries (the other thing on the plate is some nasty tuna-in-a-packet, which I do NOT recommend, not on Monday, not ever).
And it makes super shrimp — or, as Eleanor Shellstrop would say, schrampies.
Now, my nails. It’s St. Patrick’s Day this week, so of course I did lucky nails. The accent nail even says, “Lucky Me”. Since I got the official word that I do NOT need chemo and have a very small chance of cancer recurring, I think I can claim lucky.
The base color on all the nails is Maniology’s Lasso. Then I topped the accent nail with Maniology’s Sparkling Palms glittery nail powder. The pale green stamping polish is Maniology’s Tutu Mele, and the dark green stamping polish is Maniology’s Garden Gnome. The gold stamping polish is Born Pretty’s In Fire. The stamping plates are MoYou London’s Festive Collection 21 and Maniology’s M048.
Happy Monday, happy St. Pat’s, happy everything.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Write about frying.
MA
Michael Hodges
March 14, 2022 at 10:21amWhen I think of frying sometimes I think about cooking. Other times I think about frying, under the weight of an XXL special-order flak vest with sapi-plates that were too small and didn’t cover my once-broad chest. But they covered the heart, and that had to be enough. Would that there were a social armor equivalent.
Anyway, frying. From South of the border way down in Kuwait, all the way North up past Baghdad along MSR (Main Supply Route) Tampa, I remember frying. Inside the trucks were large boxes, centered between the front seats, we called **doghouses**, filled with some truck guts and wiring, and a bit of bare/spare/rare minimum storage. Mostly, they fell over the extended engine and exhaust of the giant Oshkosh Wisconsin-born vehicles we drove.
Heat emanated from these things like Satan’s oven, cooking up at you at around 250. Outside the truck the Devil’s Sandbox beat down at you with temperatures unknown because by 10:00 a.m. the thermometers had pegged at 140 in the shade, needles ticking ineffectively like the gear-failed second hand on some torturer’s clock: **It will never be time to go home, you’re here forever . . .**
The seatbelts wouldn’t fit around your protective vest, and you were punished if caught without your seat belt. IF you managed to get your seatbelt fastened, they seldom functioned properly in order to quick-release, and you were yelled at if you couldn’t disembark quickly enough to suit some humvee-riding Master Sergeant.
Trying to sweat but failing, drinking water from plastic bottles that leached God knows what chemicals into us, stored in the sun and served at room temperature if you lived in Hell, the cooking phrase occurred to me that explained both my physical and emotional state: I was simmering in my own juices.
When I think about those days I often think about the children I saw, running barefoot up and down the side of the road, unflinching on asphalt that grew soft in the midday inferno. Their feet looked like something out of a Tolkien movie, with callused soles grown thick as flip-flops.
They were children, and sometimes they were just children like any other children, smiling and laughing and playing, absorbed with an uncanny acceptance of “the rea world, the world that simply IS” in that way children have. Other times they were dangerous, the sort of expendable utility one might use to walk a bomb into a crowd unnoticed. Expendable for me? No, unwitting bomber or otherwise. But in some cultures and mindsets, that’s just how shit goes, send a kid nobody will even look at in order to get closer, and if the kid blows up too, well, it was the will of Allah.
I hated that. Growing up the way I did, with people who preached love and treated me like a tool, whenever I saw kids being used it triggered me as little else does. **The Will of Allah** indeed. I learned a phrase for the occasions anyone told me kids as part of war were just Allah’s will: **Allah befekhtel ante ekhmar.** The spelling’s likely wrong for translit, but the sentiment is there: God thinks you’re a jackass.
Frying. Simmering in my own hatred for such people. Most over there were just ordinary folks, trying to get on with their iives, hating war as much as I did. But there were some, and I reckon God/Jove/Jehovah/Yahweh/Allah will have a place reserved for ’em. Maybe He’ll let me have a turn, maybe not. In a world where everybody deserves to live it’s mystically undeniable some dogs need killin’.
I remember being unexpectedly stalled on the side of the road, way out in the middle of nowhere. There was NOTHING for miles around but a small mud house, and one of our trucks had broken down do the whole convoy stopped.
Get out. Weapons up. Patrol your perimeter, eyes open, head on a swivel.
She may have been 40, she may have been 80. Frying. The sun there is different, it turns your skin to leather and your mind to frustration.
She was alone, and she seemed scared when she came down to our area to see what was going on outside her house. I waved and motioned her to be calm, we’d be moving on.
I was often singled out over there. It’s not in my nature to look through people as though they’re not there. And because I see them, sometimes they see me right back. While others were waving guns as a kind of universal symbol to **get back** I kept my weapon handy, but secondary.
She went back to her house and returned with a plate of food, pointing at me, pointing at the food, and then stepping back the way one might try to coax a wild animal to accept a morsel from the hand.
I wanted to take it. I wanted to believe the gesture, wanted it sooooo very much in my truest heart of hearts. But that’s not the way of war, and it’s possible she was of the utmost sincerity, seeking to bridge all the same gaps I try to bridge, and it’s possible she would have gladly martyred herself in poisoning me so as to kill an infidel.
I left the plate in the road where she set it as we finally drove away, curious forevermore what I’d done, waste or salvation.
God damn those circumstances.
Frying,
I’ve wondered over the years what she fried that bread in, whether it would have tasted of manna, or of death.
Frying.
Frying sausage for a pizza after I’d been home for nearly two weeks, the first thing I cooked for myself in a home I’d returned to, a home that was still strange to me, with strange sounds and smells . . . with voices outside my door that didn’t even consider me, but because I didn’t know them I glanced around for a rifle, or reached for a knife that was no longer attached to my hip.
I was frying sausage, mad with glee for the act; and I was flinching and jerking sometimes when a car door slammed or a neighbor spoke too loudly, or the central heating kicked on in a world that was too quiet, a world without motors and generators and people clothed in yellow-beige-brown patterns.
I wasn’t frying much anymore, but I reckon for a while there I was drowning in whatever they used to put out the fire.
Marian Allen
March 14, 2022 at 10:34amOMG, Michael, I love you SO HARD!
Dan Antion
March 14, 2022 at 3:42pmI think I’d have to move out to bring that in. Food looks good, but…
Cool nails.
Marian Allen
March 15, 2022 at 8:12amYeah, I wasn’t figuring on the clearance. It enlarges the footprint considerably. 🙁