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.