Why hello there! And welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where like a Quiverfull wife, we’re more late than not, and I have no idea if today’s post continues that trend. (If you don’t get the joke, don’t Google it, you’ll just be sad.) Today, we’re whipping up some fast Air-Fryer snacks, because my family treats my presence as a burden, and I long for death! This is a weird opening energy. Anywho, we’re making Pasta Chips and what I’m calling “Papilla Chips”. What does that mean? Only those brave enough to ignore this link that takes them straight to the recipe will know. Come, brave adventurers, let’s dig in!

De-Spicing My Sass

I should note that before we continue: the ACTUAL reason we’re making fast snacks is because “It was tech/opening weekend for the show I was in, so we didn’t have time for a lot of options.” I’m just in a minorly miffed mood because right after our Sunday matinee and family dinner,  I got hit with a migraine that I couldn’t take my meds for. (Due to a (thankfully mild) mix of family members getting COVID and our rehearsal/opening schedule,  my family hasn’t actually gotten to distribute all of the Christmas presents my mother fills the downstairs with when I leave for Leavenworth, meaning I haven’t been able to fully unpack due lack of room. So my pills were still in one of my crates from the trip, and once I realized I was having a migraine, I didn’t have the energy to go digging. Of course, once recovered, I was able to find them in under a minute of effort, so it’s that’s not a risk going forward.) Thus, I MEANT to start this post like, 4 ½ hours ago, and am frustrated at the lost time. (Editor’s note: That bit was written at 11 PM on Sunday night, which is why this went up Tuesday morning.)

When I get migraines, I turn my room into a Euphoria shoot, in order to feel youthful again. (Actually, the saturated light hurts my eyes less.)

Anywho. Today’s post was also important because I have gazed into the future, and we are almost certainly NOT making a vegetarian dish for next Monday’s post, so if I didn’t want to impose vegetarianism on myself per the terms of our SMART goals, I needed vegetarian or vegan options TODAY. My family was not in a particularly veg-forward MOOD, but it was brought up that “pasta chips” are very fast and simple once you’ve boiled the pasta, and we had just cooked some pasta for dinner the other night. The stars had aligned, and a plan was formed. And because the process is (on paper) so simple, I think it’s time to be a little more thorough in explaining our tools.

What in the Kentucky-Fried-F**k IS An Air-Fryer?

You know what a convection oven is? It’s a fancy version of that.

If you DON’T know what a convection oven is, BEHOLD THE MONOLITH.

I had to edit the pictures of the front, because I did not realize the reflective nature of the machine meant you could see that I hadn’t yet buttoned up my house-jacket.

That’s an Instant Pot 6-Quart Vortex Air Fryer, most of which is just branding, and the rest is just a measurement. Indeed. “air fryer” is  form of genericization: that thing that companies hate where their product name becomes synonymous with the common-noun form of the product. “Escalator” used to be a brand, as were Band-aid, Linoleum, and Aspirin. (Aspirin actually still IS a brand name in some countries, where they have to use the chemical compound “acetylsalicylic acid” or ASA if they’re not the Bayer company. Also, and this is insane: the original pronunciation for escalator was “Es-CAL-a-tor”, almost like Excalibur.)

What was I saying? Oh yeah, convection. So, if you’ve never had a convection oven, it is the complicated technical machine of “an oven with fans in it”. See, since ovens use radiant heating, they need the air to transfer heat to the food. That’s much easier/more efficient when the air is MOVING more. Thus, you build an oven with a fan behind the heating element to “blow the heat” onto the food, and you can cook food faster. And if you peek your head inside an air-fryer, that’s what you’ll see:

Or, you know, take a picture of it. Putting your head in heating machines is generally not wise.

Thus, the premise is simple: the high-power fan blows the hot air around. This allows food to cook faster than in a normal oven, generating more browning. Now, with motors having been reduced in size since the convection oven was developed in the 1940’s, you can have counter-top convection ovens, which have existed for a while, but weren’t particular big news until the mid 2010’s, when they got gussied up into the aforementioned monoliths.

It also helped that adopting a ‘fryer’ style system helped one of the flaws of a convection oven, which was that there was always an issue with cooking surface: for optimum airflow, you’d want the product fully exposed, but no one just puts their food straight onto the oven racks. You need a baking sheet to get it out easily, but that baking sheet messes with the air-flow pattern. By creating a self-contained cooking basket with a perforated grate, like a frying basket, the counter-top system can circumvent one of the issues faced by the oven models.

And that’s…basically it. You’re in a kind of middle ground between “oven” and “legitimately frying”, where deep frying something would be EVEN FASTER (because oil transfers heat/absorbs the “cold” of the food even BETTER, being a liquid instead of a gas), but cooking in an oven would be slower, gentler, and thus more easily controlled. At least, in the cooking sense. From a design standpoint, it’s actually really easy to operate these machines: you push the button for the setting you want to use, there’s a knob so you can set cooking time and desired temp, the machine will beep to tell you to turn/toss the food part-way through the process.

It will be pretty clear on what it wants from you.

So, that’s the technical specs, how’d the recipes go?

Piece of the Past-A.

I will, in a shocking turn of events, open up to you all emotionally for a moment: One of the reasons I suggested Pasta Chips was to try to recreate a lost dream of mine. By which I mean that a couple years ago, Safeway had some Bow-Tie Pasta Crisps that were pretty good, but I haven’t seen them in like, 2-3 years, and I miss them.

I bet I will discover them randomly at like, Walmart in the next couple weeks.

Tragically, we didn’t have the farfalle on hand, which A: would have been closer to the chips I know, and B, are the actual pasta used in the recipe, as we had already made rigatoni. So I had to experiment with tubby little tubes. And honestly, the initial recipe was very easy, so it’s amazing how badly things went. Like, all of today’s recipes are taken from, respectively, page 87 of the Delish Air-Fryer Made Easy  “cookbook” you can probably find in your local Albertsons or Safeway, a half-assed attempt to make up something, and page 61 of the Cookbook.

You start with a pound of pasta, cook it, then toss it with some parmesan, garlic powder, Italian seasoning, and salt and pepper. Somehow, in the O’GUIN Kitchen, of all kitchens, we didn’t have TWO of those ingredients. Specifically, we were somehow out of Parmesan, and Italian Seasoning. Which is madness. Here is a NON-COMPREHENSIVE list of cheeses we have in just the UPSTAIRS fridge: Gouda, Emmantaler, at least 3 cheddars, probably 3 different Boursins, Stilton, Gloucestershire, Juusto, multiple bags of shredded cheeses, raclette…and this is me reciting from MEMORY. That was less than HALF of the list.. But no Parm. I had to resort to PECORINO, like some kind of SHEPHERD.

Little Sheep’s Milk cheese joke for the cheese-y joke lovers.

So, to recap, we went in with what was, fundamentally, a 4 ingredient recipe: farfalle pasta, parmesan, garlic powder, Italian seasoning. (Salt and Pepper don’t actually count.) And we wound up with rigatoni tossed with pecorino, garlic powder, and Herbs de Provence.

How’d it go? Well, for a first attempt…meh?

Honestly, they LOOK pretty damn good in this picture. I assure you, the look is a little less appetizing in person.

Literally every batch cooked notably faster than even the low-estimates of the cook times. (maybe, more on that in a second.) Which was likely because, as “4 day old pasta”, the rigatoni didn’t have the expected internal OR external moisture of freshly cooked: the implication from the recipe is that the cheese and seasoning will naturally stick to the pasta as you toss it, due to heat and water, which took a lot more effort (And a bit of vegetable oil) to replicate.

The results weren’t bad, they were just unimpressive.

For notably LESS impressive results, we have to go to the SECOND batch.

See, the recipe notes that you’ll have to work in two batches, so I thought this would be a great time to try and replicate a vegan version: replace the parmesan cheese with a couple cheese-substitutes (a mixture of Nutritional Yeast and a seasoned mixture of ground-nuts and nutritional yeast) and some extra oil to replace the missing fat from the cheese. Which had a MUCH better coating process, I can tell you. And then it tricked me: the first batch I pulled several minutes early, as noted, due to uneven cooking. This batch LOOKED much better, so I let it go the whole time…which appeared to be a minute or two too long.

Goddamn, I should have just lied and said these were great, because they look GREAT in these shots.

Again, they’re not AWFUL, but they’re not particularly pleasant either. Like, I want to give these pretty close to a 60%, in the “one point from failing” interpretation as was used in my school system. The first batch were unimpressive, D+ kind of material: you can see the IDEA behind them, and believe with a some iteration, a bit of practice, you think they’ll get better. These feel like they need a MASSIVE rework to function correctly. (on review other vegan recipes: this IS supposedly the basic framework, I just used too much nutritional yeast, and probably the aforementioned lower-moisture inside the pasta led to it getting drier than the recipe intended.

Disappointed by both of these results, I salvaged my pride in the most efficient way I know: Sweets. So let’s talk “Papilla Chips”

A Sweet Summation

Firstly, to explain the name: these are just cinnamon-sugar tortilla chips, which remind me a lot of sopapillas, also known as sopaipillas, and a couple other names, which are…basically a Spanish version of an Italian zeppole. Indeed, they’re derived from the same Arabic word, one was just translated into Sicilian Italian, the other into Andalusian Spanish. If you DIDN’T read the zeppole post that I JUST LINKED, they’re basically just fried balls of dough, often rolled in sugar. Think like, “mini elephant ears”.

I just realized that might be a regional name, so in case it’s not common: elephant ears are like, large flat donuts you can get at fairs or festivals. Basically a flat donut, covered in cinnamon sugar.

I’ll definitely want to go more into that dish at a later date, as it’s something of a old-school family favorite. (Where for years, even to this day, I struggle to say the name correctly, because my dad used to say “so-pa-pa-pilla”, in the rhythm of the old Chia Pet commercials. I just mentally always add the extra syllable.) So we won’t get too deep into the history or anything. Nor is there much to get deep on with the recipe: make a cinnamon-sugar mixture, cut some flour tortillas into chips, toss them in melted butter, then the cinnamon sugar, and air-fry them to crispy-sweet goodness.

And THESE ones DON’T look good?! What the hell is going on with this?

The only real trouble I had with these is A: it’s a pretty cool time of year around here, so my melted butter re-solidified pretty quickly in the bowl with the tortillas, and B: I discovered partway through the process that I had to leave 30 minutes sooner than I thought, meaning I needed to rush the last couple batches. But the results were far and away the most successful. Nate alone ate 1/6th of the entire batch.

And thus, we snatched a victory out of the grips of marginal, highly questionable pseudo-defeat. Hopefully, you’ve learned more about air-fryers, and whether they’re something you’d be interested in, and if you’ve got one, you’ve learned something that will be cool to try out. We’ve definitely already bought more pasta and actual Parmesan to see if we can improve. Anyway, I’ve got to go and see about ordering way too many dumplings and sauce. BYE.

THURSDAY: JON FLUMPHS HIS WAY THROUGH SOME NONSENSE.

MONDAY: THE LUNAR NEW YEAR IS ALMOST UPON US. WE DISCUSS THE TRADITIONS, DISHES, AND PROBABLY MAKE SOMETHING WITH DOUGH.

Recipes

Pasta Chips

Makes 4-5 servings

Ingredients

1/2 pound pasta (preferably farfalle or “bow-tie”, but you can do whatever shape you’re willing to experiment with)

Vegetarian(ish) version

¼ cup finely grated Parmesan

½ tsp Italian seasoning

½ tsp garlic powder

Salt and Pepper

                Vegan version

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp nutritional yeast

½ tsp Italian seasoning

½ tsp garlic powder

Salt and Pepper

Preparation

1. Cook the pasta according to package directions, drain, and then toss with all of the ingredients of whichever version you prefer.

2. Air-Fry the pasta at 400 degrees for around 8 minutes, tossing partway through. Shake out onto a baking sheet to cool, and serve.

Papilla Chips

Ingredients

6 medium-sized flour tortillas

4 tbsp melted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 ½ tbsp ground cinnamon

Preparation

1. In a medium bowl, toss the cinnamon and sugar together. Cut the tortillas into 8 triangles (preferably EQUAL, but it’s your circus), and toss to coat in the melted butter in a larger bowl.

2. Toss the buttered tort tris in the cin-sug (no, I don’t know why I started abbreviating, but I will not fix it for clarity), and fry in batches (about 8 triangles per batch, depending on the size of your fryer) at 375 degrees for around 4-5 minutes.