I love fried food. I mean serious, true love. Perhaps more than I love B. Okay, let’s not get carried away, but you get the picture. If it’s deep fat fried, it’s hard for me to resist.
Potato chips, chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, crab rangoons, French fries. Hmm… French fries. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
So, you can imagine how excited I was when I heard about a deep fryer that could make 2 ½ pounds of French fries with only one tablespoon of oil. Sound too good to be true? Well, we’ll never know.
I was reading the latest issue of Food Network Magazine, getting my in-print tour of Ellie Krieger’s kitchen. What was the one small appliance she couldn’t live without (I may be taking a little dramatic license here for effect, so don’t hold me to the exact quote)? T-Fal’s ActiFry, the revolutionary deep fryer that can make 2 ½ pounds of French fries with only one tablespoon of oil.
I immediately whipped out the iPhone, and punched in T-Fal’s website. And to be really, super clear, I selected the category for deep fryers. That’s important. You’ll find out why later.
There it is, on the page with all the other deep fryers manufactured by T-Fal. The ActiFry. The claims are true, and worth repeating. Two ½ pounds of French fries with only one tablespoon of oil.
All for the low, low price of $300.
Gulp, $300 is pretty steep for a small kitchen appliance. But if I can make French fries that were actually healthy, imagine what else I can make.
It was like Christmas Eve, but instead of visions of sugar plums, I had visions of doughnuts, homemade potato chips, buffalo wings, and of course, French fries.
This is the small kitchen appliance that could literally change my life. Literally. I am not being a drama queen. I love fried food that much.
So I placed my order. A few short days later, the ActiFry arrives on my doorstep. I go from Christmas Eve to Christmas morning. I’m tearing this box open, pulling the machine out of it’s Styrofoam haven. It’s quite ugly, but who cares. It’s a miracle machine. It can be as ugly as it wants to be.
The first thing I do is grab the recipe book it comes with. I’m flipping through, and flipping through… looking for all the healthfully fried food recipes. Yup, there’s the French fry recipe. Oh, a sweet potato fry recipe. What’s this? Risotto? Vegetable stir fry? Soup?
Are you effing kidding me?
Turns out, the only “fried” food this $300 pile of lies actually “fries” is French fries. Nothing else. In fact, it specifically says not to “fry” anything breaded in it. So long, fried pickle dream.
I don’t even bother to try making French fries. I don’t care how good they come out. The frozen fries from the grocery story baked on my perforated pizza pan that I got at the Calphalon outlet for $10 are just fine. (Plus, for $3, I can get an order of fries from the new Five Guys Burgers & Fries that opened up in my town and could possibly be the best fries I’ve ever had.) No need to spend $300 for a multi-purpose cooker.
If it was advertised as a multi-purpose cooker that happens to cook 2 ½ pounds of French fries with just one tablespoon of oil, then fine. It is what it is. But it’s advertised as a deep fryer. That’s not okay.
In fact, that’s false advertising. I put a lot of faith in the truth in advertising laws, and I feel taken advantage of. Within 48 hours, the ActiFry was in the hands of UPS, making it’s way back to T-Fal. My $300 soon to be credited back to my Visa.
Oh, and guess who is a paid spokesperson for the product? That's right. Ellie Krieger. I should have known better.
$300 will buy 100 orders of fries at Five Guys. And you know what, I don’t even care how many tablespoons of oil it took to cook them. They are French fries, in the purest form.
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Other musings as of late…
• I cooked lamb for Easter dinner at B’s house for his family, and it wasn’t half bad. (Thank you, Martha Stewart.) Farm fresh, and I mean watching the lamb carcass get butchered so I could have my 4 lb boneless leg of lamb roast fresh, is the way to go. But I missed my traditional Easter ham.
• B and I went to a Samuel Adams beer tasting dinner with Jen and S last week. It was really interesting to see how they paired different varieties of Sam Adams beers to the different kinds of food. I was surprised how much I liked the Cherry Wheat beer when it was paired with a salad with Cherry Wheat vinaigrette. Yum. We all got commemorative 25th anniversary perfect pint glasses, which B and S left at the dinner table. And after retrieving them, B left his in the bar.
• B cooked a delicious stuffed chicken earlier this week. Boneless, skinless chicken breast stuffed with ham and Muenster cheese, topped with a mushroom cream sauce. His kitchen skills really put me to shame. (But let me tell you, that was one hell of a salad I made to accompany his masterpiece.)
