Air Fryer Adventures and a Book about Consciousness

A couple of months ago, we replaced our aging toaster with a multi-use air fryer that takes up roughly the same footprint on the counter. It is the Ninja flip, a model chosen not based on any research but on the enthusiastic recommendation of my Aussie friend. Air fryers have been in vogue for several years now, so I am a late adopter here. 

There's a whole world of air fryer recipes out there but I haven't explored them much yet. We mostly use it for reheating frozen quorn nuggets and other things like quesadillas, and for making delicious toasted sandwiches. On the air fryer mode, bread doesn't brown very much but it gets wonderfully crisp.

Here are a couple things that did use the air fryer. If you have any air fryer recipes you love, do share! I would love to make the most of this appliance. 

DIY frozen pizzas

The first is DIY frozen pizzas. I occasionally stock the freezer with store-bought frozen pizzas to bake for my kids for quick meals or snacks. I wanted to try making a batch myself as a meal prep thing. This Kitchn post was my main recipe inspiration.

1. Making the dough: I made a batch of this recipe. I usually make no-knead pizza dough but it is very sticky and I figured a conventional dough might be easier to roll out in the next step. This was my first time using my stand mixer for pizza dough and it was a bit tricky to know when the dough was ready. I gave it a slow rise overnight in the fridge and the dough turned out beautiful and pliable.
2. Par-baking the dough into pizza bases: I rolled out balls of pizza dough on parchment into little individual-size pizzas, about 6 inches or so, then baked them as directed for just a few minutes until barely cooked. The pizza bases did puff up quite a bit, so it is good to roll them quite thinly in the first place unless you prefer a very thick crust. The baked pizza bases made me very nostalgic, because these pizza bases were sold in India back in the day (they likely still are), and this is how we made pizza at home. You would buy a few pizza bases, cubes of Amul cheese, make some tomato sauce from scratch (although some used ketchup straight-up as pizza sauce), and pan-fry the pizzas until the bases were crispy and golden and the cheese was all melty. Good times! I just remembered that I've written a whole post about this 18 years ago.
3. Assembling the pizzas and freezing them: Assembly is super simple. I spread some jarred pizza sauce on the cooled bases, then topped with shredded mozzarella. Then I arranged the pizzas on plates and put them directly in the freezer to freeze solid. Once frozen so that the toppings are firmly in place, the pizzas can be wrapped in plastic wrap and stacked into a box or bag.
4. Baking frozen pizzas: Simply unwrap a frozen pizza and pop it into the air fryer at about 290C for 8 minutes. (Adjust temp and time as needed). It is something older kids can easily do themselves. 

Rolling out pizza dough

After par-baking

Another recipe I tried that involves the air fryer is the chili soy curls recipe from Vegan Richa. Richa has been a blogger for a long time, her story is inspiring and her recipes and cookbooks are worth seeking out. 

This recipe involved marinating rehydrated soy curls and baking them in the air fryer- already they were tasty and would be wonderful just as an appetizer. 

Baked marinated soy curls

The baked soy curls are added to a tasty Indo-Chinese sauce. This was one of those easy recipes (I made it on a weeknight), full of flavor and it fed me for a few meals over a bit of steamed Jasmine rice. 

Chili soy curls

* * *

I read a fantastic book last month, Being You: a new science of consciousness by the British neuroscientist Anil Seth, published in 2021. It was a thought-provoking and enlightening read.

One time, a friend and I were walking and she mentioned that her school-aged child was asking her deep questions like, "What happens when we die?" She said that she gently told him that no one knows. I said something to the effect that what could happen when we die? What happened before we were born? Absolutely nothing. 

What does this anecdote have to do with the book? The author said something very similar in the prologue- "When the end of consciousness comes, there is nothing- really nothing- to be frightened of". I knew I would like this book and author. I concur with Anil Seth that everything has a logical explanation. Everything. We may not understand everything yet, but we don't have to spin up magical explanations.

Here is a little taste of the book and things I found interesting. 

• Prologue
• General anesthesia is a great illustration of what happens upon loss of consciousness. It is very different from going to sleep. Anesthesia does not work on the mind or brain, it works on your consciousness. You are simply not there. It is a premonition of the total oblivion of death.
• Somehow in our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons is giving rise to a conscious experience.
• For each of us, the conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is no world and no self.
• The real problem of consciousness
• For a conscious creature, there is something that it is like to be that creature. Thomas Nagel wrote a legendary article in 1947 on philosophy of mind “What is it like to be a bat?”
• Consciousness is first and foremost about subjective experience- it is about phenomenology- having language, being intelligent, or exhibiting particular behavior is not what defines consciousness.
• This chapter explains the hard problem of consciousness (why and how can something like consciousness arise from physical structures like neurons?) and the author's preferred "real problem of consciousness"- explaining why a particular pattern of brain activity- or other physical process- maps to a particular kind of conscious experience. 
• We should not necessarily expect scientific explanations to always be intuitively satisfying. Quantum mechanics is notoriously counterintuitive but nevertheless widely accepted as the best explanation of physical reality. 
• Measuring consciousness
• Consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other.
• Psychedelic drugs affect the brain’s serotonin system by binding strongly to a receptor. There is a breakdown in the patterns of connectivity that characterize the brain under normal conditions. That gives the signature features of the psychedelic state- dissolution of boundaries between self and the world, intermingling of the senses.
• Perceiving from the inside out (fantastic chapter)
• Everything we see is a construction of our brain, a kind of “controlled hallucination”. The brain is not a computer so much as it is a prediction machine.
• Imagine you are a brain, sealed up inside a skull where it is dark and silent. The only input is electrical signals, and they don’t come with labels attached (“I’m from a cup of coffee”) or even with a label of modality (touch/sound/sight).
• We can never know the world as it is, even something as basic as color exists only in the interaction between a world and a mind.
• Expect yourself
• The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.
• There is no single indivisible self, it is just a bundle of perceptions, which can fall apart by meditation, drugs, brain damage.
• When supernatural or bizarre experiences like out of body experiences and near death experiences are reported, we can take them seriously. They reveal that first-person perspectives are put together in more complex, provisional, and precarious ways than we will ever have direct subjective access to. 
• And so on...I highly recommend this book if you are interested in these topics.

Mini Banana Pancakes, Oven Omelet, Public Libraries, Muscle

I can't remember where I came across mini banana pancakes- it might have been a post I spotted while scrolling on Reddit- but I thought they were adorable and wanted to make them right away. The problem is that roughly 3 times a day, I come across something I want to make right away. Anyway, the idea was shelved until last weekend. I had 2 colleagues stopping by for breakfast, plus a lone banana sitting on the counter, so it seemed opportune. 

Mini banana pancakes are nothing but banana slices dunked in pancake batter, and each slice fished out and cooked on a griddle. You end up with banana encased in a tiny pancake. It is an adorable and yummy bite-sized breakfast food. I highly recommend trying this. There's no recipe needed, really, but here's one on a blog. You can use any pancake batter you liked. I used the Kodiak pancake mix which we keep on hand. 

Another dish I served for breakfast that morning- an oven omelet. This is also a great meal prep breakfast as squares can be stored and warmed up easily.

• Preheat oven to 350F
• Whisk together
• 8 large eggs
• Splash of cream
• Salt, pepper, red pepper flakes (or any spices)
• Finely chopped veggies- onion, red and green bell pepper
• Minced cilantro
• Chopped veggie sausage (optional)
• 1 tbsp flour (optional; makes it more like a crustless quiche)
• Pour into greased 8 x 8 pan and bake for 30-40 mins

* * * 

I've been thinking a lot lately of how much I love public libraries in the US- they just might be my very favorite thing about this country. I'm lucky to have a big, regional one just minutes from my house. Most of the books I read are borrowed from this library, plus they have a calendar of events that hums with workshops and lectures and concerts. The teen section attracts middle schoolers after school as a hangout place and the children's section always has art supplies, story times, author readings...Yesterday, there was a community health fair going on in the corridors when I popped in to pick up a book that I had put on hold. 

There's so much in my library that I don't even take advantage of. For instance, I'd like to use the 3D printer in the library sometime to make cookie cutters in some fun shapes. 

There is a concept of a third space in sociology: the "first space" is home and the "second space" is the workplace; the "third space" is a public space outside of home and work where people can gather, socialize, and connect with their community. The library really is the only indoor "third space" left any more where you can spend time without feeling obliged to spend money. Last time I was there, I saw a woman with a young child in a stroller anxiously asking a librarian how federal funding cuts would affect our library. The response was that they have no idea. I hope that as a community we can come together and protect our precious public libraries no matter what happens. 

A few weeks ago, I saw a flyer advertising a craft supplies swap in one of the library's multipurpose rooms that weekend. It gave me a much-needed incentive to clean out an entire closet and pull out two big boxes of craft and sewing supplies that I didn't need any more. I brought these to the craft swap and found a room full of treasures to choose from. You can see my haul below- a couple of embroidery kits, a beautiful book on sashiko (I've always wanted to try this), watercolor paints and stickers for the kids, a cute fabric piece, a skein of pricey yarn. A clutter-free closet + free goodies = a win win situation! Libraries are famous for these.

My craft swap haul

While browsing through the "new books" racks in this wonderful library of ours, I came across this book published only a month or two ago and checked it out right away- Stronger: The untold story of muscle in our lives by Michael Joseph Gross. 

Muscle and strength training is a topic I'm very interested in, so I truly wanted to love this book. While it's filled with fascinating information and valuable insights, the reading experience was a slog. The writing felt disorganized and repetitive, with chapters that were disjointed and titled in a way that didn’t always reflect their actual content. The book centers on a few individuals and their work, but their stories were scattered throughout rather than presented in a cohesive, compelling way. With tighter editing, this could have been a much stronger read. Still, I came away with a few useful takeaways and moments of inspiration.

There's a lot of Greek history related to muscle development in the early part of this book. I skimmed over most of it, but an interesting tidbit is the tale of Milo, the strongman of Croton, who got stronger by lifting a calf every day. It grew bigger over time and he grew proportionally stronger, an early if apocryphal example of progressive overload.

Some of my other notes (emphasis is mine)--

• On muscle
• Muscle is one of the body’s most plastic tissues, changing its size and properties based on people’s habits of diet and care, work and rest.
• If you can choose only one form of exercise, it should be progressive resistance training.
• To thrive, muscle needs to work hard, it needs rest, and it needs nutritious food, especially food rich in protein.
• On muscle and mind
• For ages, people have been raised on mind-body dualism- brain vs. brawn; in fact mind and muscle are the best of friends.
• “Attentional focus” on moving a load builds more strength, and attentional focus on moving a load may build more size, a quirk of neuromuscular engagement.
• On muscle and age
• In old age, muscle increasingly decides who can live independently and who cannot.
• Your independence, autonomy, agency- your effectiveness in the world- will depend on muscle.
• High-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people (people in their 90s!), with life-changing effects.
• Strength training is safe even for the oldest people.
• A gentle exercise class for senior citizens is usually no more effective than no exercise at all- it is “placebo exercise”. Most exercise programs in nursing homes are flexibility and stretching based but in fact they don’t add any strength or balance or aerobic capacity.
• Changes in muscle are not maintained for long periods of time in the absence of continued training, for anyone, at any age.
• Almost all of the fears we have and the barriers we set for ourselves as women are in our minds.
• There are tensions between athletics and medicine. Athletics focuses on striving and extreme physical efforts; medicine focuses on steady, balanced health.
• Even as evidence is accumulating, weight training is widely scorned, slighted and dismissed as hedonistic and extreme, tainted by the anabolic steroid abuse of a few. 
• On muscle and health
• Function is largely determined by how much fat and muscle a person has, and where that fat and muscle are located.
• Exercise can interact with traditional medicine, as a standalone treatment, or alternative treatment or adjunctive treatment.
• Research on strength training as an antidepressant: lifting weights affects the brain like a drug. And because exercise has no adverse side effects for most people, it has a more favorable risk-benefit ratio than drugs. 
• Muscle is the biggest sink for glucose disposal in the body, so people who have proportionally less muscle are unable to metabolize glucose as well as people who have more muscle.
• Sensitivity to insulin is directly related to muscle mass and inversely proportional to adiposity.
• It is time that the recommendation of “weight loss” be replaced with “muscle gain and fat loss” as a standard medical recommendation for people with diabetes and anyone who is overweight and obese.

The strongest part of the book is the emphasis on strength training in older people. A few months ago, I gave a 90-minute talk to a group of local seniors on the topic of "Fitness over the lifespan". The information I learned in this book would have enhanced my talk. 

I think the take-home message of this book, and of everything we now know about strength training (which is a LOT) is that it is not something just for those other people (the gym bros, the body builders, the people who look like they lift weights), it is for me and you. Yes, YOU!! If you're confused about how to start lifting weights, I can help.

* * *

A small neighboring town is home to a wonderful barn sanctuary. It is home to 250-300 animals- cats, dogs, farm animals (sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, pigs, cattle, llamas...), birds (turkeys, peacocks, chickens, even an emu) all live together peacefully. They are strays, rescued from terrible living conditions, injured or abandoned, but now living out their best lives in a beautiful and safe place. 

The sanctuary hosted its 15th anniversary party with a fundraiser and it was the highlight of my weekend. Dozens of animals were roaming free and mingling with guests as we petted the animals, played lawn games, drank lemonade, and ate vegan hot dogs and popcorn. Here are pics of some of the cuties we saw.

Zen goat

Rotund piggy

Turkeys- huge and beautiful and chatty