Book club: Jamie's Easy Air Fryer cookbook

I saw God in a tray of Mac and Cheese, sort of

I went to bed on Thursday night with an idea. I had just cooked a disappointing meal out of Jamie Oliver’s Easy Air Fryer cookbook and, remembering the viral success of my 2018 Spinoff story “Jesse Mulligan to Jamie Oliver: You Suck” (not my headline but it did the trick), I drifted off to sleep fantasizing about horrible things I could say about his newest book.

I had only tried out one recipe but I didn’t want to wait. So I thought of some other criticisms I could make that wouldn’t require any further cooking. For example his breezy introduction - had it been written by Chat GPT? - claimed that over fifty per cent of British households now have an air fryer. This sounded implausible (I later looked the statistic up online, and if anything fifty per cent is an underestimate).

The meal I had made was Jamie’s Cauliflower Mac and Cheese, which [my wife thinks the harsh critique of the recipe I included at this point in my newsletter meant that I was trying to have it both ways - being mean while telling you I was choosing not to be mean - and I think she is right so I’ve deleted it.]

I wished I had made Kelly Gibney’s version, in which she avoids milk altogether, simmering the cauliflower in chicken stock on a stovetop, then blending it into an extremely tasty sauce (if you have children and struggle to get them eating a range of vegetables, this is the recipe for you).

Anyway I woke up on Good Friday morning and I don’t know if it was the spirit of the season that moved me but I no longer felt inclined to write the take-down piece. I wonder if it’s a bit like the angry email you write but never send; the act of imagining my cookbook review in great detail was therapeutic enough that publishing now felt like an act of spite. “Jesse Mulligan to Jamie Oliver: You still suck” would have bought me a few new readers, but I’m happy with the ones I’ve got.

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So, I don’t want a medal for being nice to Jamie Oliver. But it made me think of a couple of things.

First, being generous towards and assuming the best of famous people seems like a good instinct - like being polite to Alexa. Full disclosure: I once yelled “you are a TERRIBLE assistant!” to the Okay Google voice while in the car trying to get directions but I didn’t feel better afterwards. I think there’s a case to be made that being charitable begets being charitable - that by showing kindness towards an inanimate technology or a movie star on Instagram we are more likely to take that attitude of kindness into the world. There’s another argument, I suppose, that by venting our anger at those who can’t feel it we put ourselves in a better frame of mind to deal with those who can. But I don’t buy it - or at least, I haven’t experienced it.

The other consideration in New Zealand (and on social media, which has shrunk the world to the size of New Zealand) is that when you say something mean about or to a celebrity, there’s a good chance they will actually read it - that they actually will feel it. Ask any politician - someone who outside of their job is somebody’s father, wife, daughter, or son - about the sort of nasty garbage they get sent by people who should no better (and those on the right get it just as bad as those on the left).

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The other thing is that to make a living as a writer in 2025 one needs to be read. It used to be that you could write good quality prose for a good quality magazine and people would find you - I would read the Lois Daish’s food column in The Listener not based on the headline (“How to use those chokos you bought at the grower’s market” was a good one but it would never cut through the algo) but because I had already bought and paid for it, and it was the only food story I was likely to come across that week.

But now good writing has been atomised. We have more access to the greatest minds in the world, but not enough time to read them. Social media should do the job of pushing the best ones to us based on their general popularity and specific relevance to our tastes. But we still, many of us, wake up with a dozen great longform reading options in our inbox each day, and invariably make some choices over who we will spend our time reading before the kids wake up. If the essay can’t be distilled into a lizard-brain stirring headline, it probably doesn’t stand a chance.

Substack was meant to fix some of these problems but, while it’s been good for quality, it has created a problem of quantity - you need to make noise to stand out. As a writer, you receive regular updates on how many people have opened your post, comparing it to your rolling average. You know when you’ve written a stinker, and when your piece is starting to get noticed - and you know that these things depend mostly, or at least firstly, on the hookiness of what you’ve chosen to write about. This was meant to be a place where you wrote about what you were interested in and your audience would find you, but that theory doesn't account for them also finding 50 other writers they liked, and needing to quickly choose what they read each morning based on instinct and cosmetic appeal.

Meanwhile the platform urges readers to follow more and more people - often half a dozen at a time, bundled for free with a new subscription. Enough is never enough.

One solution to all this clutter seems to be the Substack newsfeed which, aside from serving you new subscription ideas, pushes popular and ideology-affirming posts from those you follow right to the top of the queue.

The platform is being Spotified - limitless choice but we’re going to all end up reading the same things. The bigger the cone of possibility, the more we end up funnelled toward the same destination.

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As discussed last week I’m getting a lot out of the book Religion for Atheists, which argues that you can benefit from some aspects of religion even if you don’t believe in God. One of the things we miss without any church or similar rituals is that in a world which markets all the worst human impulses - greed, individualism, over-consumption and vanity, among others - we no longer have very much reminding us of a better way to live. Church was a weekly appointment with somebody who told us to try harder - and it was backed up by school and other institutions that trained our children to be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck”.

We are all inclined to follow our lowest impulses; to put it another way, we are all human. If the idea of being course-corrected by a priest each week doesn’t appeal I think there is an argument for building in some other form of regular contemplation - to encourage the aspects of ourselves we want to win out against lesser temptations.

I’m increasingly feeling like writing this newsletter might be it for me, but it could easily be a journal, or a poetry habit, or a meditation, or a mindfulness ritual, or a church group, or even a regular coffee with somebody to whose grace you aspire. As Religion for Atheists points out, nobody is going to buy a billboard encouraging forgiveness - we need to build our own reminders into daily life.

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The other thing I’ve found … let’s call it “emotionally soothing” recently is reaching out to people who I disagree with. I’ve had a week of particularly nourishing chats, sometimes face-to-face, with people I would never have dreamed I would break bread with (one advantage of having a public profile is you can email almost anyone and say “keen for a beer?” and it doesn’t seem weird, at least I hope not). Even the reading and listening I’ve been doing around religion (thanks to I Ate Auckland reader Courtney for recommending Re-enchanting, a judgment free podcast featuring on-to-it Christians interviewing a mix of (sometimes atheist) guests) has made me feel much closer to the people who believe. I asked my wife today “do you think Jesus will sneak up on me?” but I don’t think it’s that - more that there is a special chemical your brain releases when you open your heart up to people who’ve come to radically different conclusions to you.

This is of course one of modern life’s biggest cliches - that we should put our differences aside, remember that we are all human, get out of our echo chambers blah blah blah. What I think the cliche may be missing is that we are often told to be civil to our enemy because it’s better for the world, but I’m discovering that it may also be better for our souls.

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Last night I made Jamie’s Air Fryer Sesame Chicken Balls, substituting pork but otherwise staying true to his list of ingredients: coriander stalks, chilli, peanut butter, soy sauce, garlic and ginger. I rolled each meatball in sesame seeds then put them in the air fryer for ten minutes, at which point they were cooked through, juicy and delicious.