SUDDENLY WE HAVE become empty nesters. It is exciting to see our young men off doing their own thing and it is, in many ways, liberating for us too – less mess, less noise and a lot less washing. But cooking for two requires some readjustment – there is less need for a lot of leftovers (despite my love of these for an easy, quick lunch) so I’m making a concerted effort to produce less.

While I’ve had an air fryer for a few years I have never really loved it. It didn’t make it any faster or easier to cook a meal for the four of us. I did use it for specific things – it made beautifully crisp tofu bites or roasted veges – but mostly it sat on the shelf. That has now changed a little. For starters, I couldn’t bear to put on the oven in our already hot house over summer, and also its capacity means that it is perfect for cooking for one or two people.

I’d been toying with the idea of air-fryer recipes for a while, but I had held off because I felt it needed to be part of a feature on cooking for two. I’m certainly not using the air fryer exclusively, but it is being used more frequently and often in conjunction with the stove top. All the recipes here have instructions for using either an air fryer or an oven.

Air fryers vary a lot in basket shape and sizes, so you may need to adjust the recipes and timings here to suit your own machine (mine is a single round basket, 22cm diameter). Silicone baskets or baking paper can be useful for catching and retaining juices, and smaller air fryer-proof baking or foil dishes can be useful.