Whether you fancy a pulled ‘pork’ sandwich or a filling chana masala, these are the meat-free recipes to get you through the first chilly weeks of the year
At this time of year, the air is colder, the nights are longer and all anyone really wants is something warm and comforting to eat. However, if you happen to be vegan, your options can still be embarrassingly limited. Still, never fear, here’s the pick of the best vegan comfort-food recipes around.
Continue reading...Cheap, hygienic and sustainable, the mattresses made by Indian fashion designer Lakshmi Menon also generate income for rural women
At the height of the pandemic in the Indian state of Kerala, fashion designer Lakshmi Menon, 46, heard that every new Covid care centre had to have 50 beds. Mattresses were in short supply. Every time a patient was discharged, the mattress had to be incinerated. “I thought: that’s a lot of mattresses and a lot of burning,” says Menon.
Menon’s solution was to collect the mountains of plastic pieces from factories that make PPE – all the little bits left over after cutting. Women then braid the bits into rope-like plaits 6ft long. The braids are laid out in a zigzag and the ends tied together. The result is a light, soft, washable, hygienic mattress for just 300 rupees (£3) – half the price of a normal one.
Continue reading...Adut Akech’s rise from Kenyan refugee camp to the international catwalk has been remarkable. She talks about her ‘fashion dad’ Edward Enninful and why she wants to see proper diversity in the fashion industry
All the best supermodels have fairytale origin stories. They are bullied at school: too tall, too flat-chested, too strange-looking. Boys prefer their more comely peers. They grow up believing themselves to be unlovable, even social outcasts. And then an outsider swoops in – perhaps at an airport (Kate Moss), in Primark (Jourdan Dunn), or McDonald’s (Gisele Bündchen). The scout plucks them from obscurity and drops them into a life of international travel, money and acclaim. Their self-doubt is sloughed away like dead skin. Bullies stand chastened. The supermodel triumphs.
Moss and co don’t have anything on Adut Akech’s origin story. Their childhoods are the Pixar remakes of her Grimms’ fairytale. Akech was born as her mother fled civil war in South Sudan and raised in a refugee camp in Kenya. At seven, she moved with her family to Australia. When she arrived, she didn’t speak any English, “I was this tall, super-shy, awkward kid,” she says. “I had a weird name, and a gap tooth.”
Continue reading...There isn’t a hint of white in designer Ms Pink’s home
Liquorice Allsorts, a pair of striped tights, the motion graphics from Top of the Pops and an X-Ray Spex album cover are just some of the surprising visual references that have inspired the kaleidoscopic home of Ms Pink and Mr Black – a creative duo.
“It’s all to do with my punk background,” explains Ms Pink. “The whole punk ethic was DIY which, for me, has carried on into interiors. There’s never been a great plan,” she continues. “These interiors are really a buildup of references from my childhood and teenage years that have all just gradually emerged here in my home.”
Continue reading...Drawing, singing, writing, knitting… lose yourself in something creative to find inner calm. You might also come up with solutions to problems
When the first lockdown began in March, my son developed a persistent cough. I was anxious and when I couldn’t sleep I would write. Inspired by the author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose soothing Instagram I would turn to in the ungodly hours, and reassured by her pragmatic take on creative endeavours, I poured my anxiety on to the page and lost myself in my story.
My son’s cough wasn’t Covid-19 as it turned out, but writing about it had helped me manage my fears around the pandemic and given me direction. Now it’s New Year, and lockdown, in some shape or another, is still a reality while most of us wait for the vaccine. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but until we get there, I have a strong feeling that making something might just help.
Continue reading...The musician and actor, 58, on falling in and out of love with his band, growing from pain, and writing lessons from Patti Smith
I’ve always viewed life as an opportunity. That might be to explore or to learn. I’m never more excited than when I find a new thing to be excited about. That might be something as simple as table tennis – but if I get excited about table tennis, I want to become really good at table tennis! There’s no midpoint with me. I’m always searching for new ways to develop myself, whether they’re physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual or whatever. I like my drive.
My generation had an unhealthy relationship with drugs. This is going to sound like real old-man shit, but regarding the young generation, I don’t worry about them doing that. I worry about how much time they spend in front of computers and phones. I worry that living in the moment has been lost.
Continue reading...I’d chosen an unconventional partner, and we both bristled at gender stereotypes. But I had sensed a distance between us, and it wasn’t just new parenthood
Today I sat on a bench facing the sea and sobbed my heart out. I don’t know if I will ever recover. This is a note on my phone, written on 9 November 2017.
I forgot about it for a couple of years, but I remember typing it as if it were yesterday. The gulls squawked and the sun dipped into the sea. I had been sitting there so long my hands were too cold to type. I put my phone into my coat pocket, and turned the buggy to face home.
Continue reading...As long as you expect your mother to be someone different, you will get hurt, says Annalisa Barbieri
I am 29. When I was nine, I found a letter addressed to a man’s name I didn’t recognise. My parents were married. When I was 11, my dad told me my mum was having an affair that had begun before their marriage. He told me how she wouldn’t be there when he came home, and would disappear at weekends. Throughout my adolescence, this man would call the house and hang up, and send cards to my mum. My dad said she was a bad person and that her morals were all mixed up.
I tried to speak to her about it as I got older, but she would angrily deny it. After my parents divorced, she thought she would be with the other man, but this never happened. Twenty years later, she still refuses to admit anything is going on. But over the years, I have seen many messages showing her wanting to be with him.
Continue reading...From exercising with animal noises to the thrills of a mini trampoline, readers share their secrets for staying healthy despite Covid restrictions
Keeping motivated while doing an online class is hard. When doing any exercise named after an animal, I find that making the sound of that animal makes the whole thing a lot more fun. For example: growl for bear crawls, yowl for leopard leaps, ribbit for frog-hop squat jumps, nibbling chatter for bunny hops, roaring for dragon crawls. I’ve also added a Mario-style “woo-hoo” for chest-to-floor burpees. In the gym, it would be hard to do this unless you don’t mind making a fool of yourself, but at home, with your mic on mute, no one knows. Iszi Lawrence, Reading
Continue reading...Did I waste one of the great self-improvement opportunities of my life playing video games, getting into craft beer and cleaning the bathroom too much?
‘Look at this,” I say to my girlfriend. “Pretty cool, right?” I am slowly rubbing a mildly abrasive product called Bar Keeper’s Friend into the white worktop of our kitchen counter, eradicating an almost invisible stain. “It’s mildly abrasive, I guess,” I continue, when she says nothing. “You remember that coffee ring?” Silence.
Seven weeks into the first lockdown, my girlfriend and I have nothing left to say to one another. Every possible human experience that has occurred in this flat over the past two and a half months has been vocalised, analysed and wrung dry. One night before bed, she pleaded: “Say something to me!” and, in desperation, I started talking about a podcast I had listened to earlier in the day, but one I couldn’t remember entirely, so I spent 20 minutes roughly explaining the concept of Nikola Tesla before falling asleep. In comparison, ushering her to the kitchen to watch me almost remove a coffee stain is a vast improvement. “It’ll probably need another going over, but …” I trail off. “How much was it?” she asks. I’m electrified by the chance at having something new to say. “It was two pounds and 99 pence.”
Continue reading...Seven years ago, she was nearly killed in pursuit of the sport she loves, but she defied expert’s predictions and made a stunning comeback
In the photographs of her record-breaking ride, the Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira is a tiny blade on the water, cutting a line of white spume down the deep ridge of the vast grey wave that climbs behind her. The wave in question measured 22.4 metres (73.5ft), the highest ever surfed by a woman, the first to be measured and verified by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a couple of feet greater than the one surfed by her nearest rival. It is also the biggest wave measured this year, surfed by man or woman.
Gabeira, who broke her own previous Guinness world record of 68ft, attributes her achievement to what she calls “taking a critical line”. In short, she takes her board to the fiercest and tallest part of the wave, “where the most powerful energy is, where it is actually breaking”. This, she says, is how “you put value into your wave”.
Continue reading...From turning up the heat with exotic chillies to the ubiquitous and ultimately rewarding rise of sourdough, readers share their ingredients of the year
Discovering – or rediscovering – the joy of cooking has been one of the few bright spots of a year spent largely at home. We asked 43 of Australia’s leading chefs, cookbook authors and bloggers to share their favourite ingredient of the year. Their answers ranged from the humble and comforting (flour, mince, red lentils) to ingeniously umami (kombu, chilli bean curd, prawn oil), with native Australian ingredients also making many a No 1 spot (wattleseed, karkalla, cunjim winyu).
Now it’s our readers’ turn to share their finds.
Continue reading...Baldwin accuses critics of ‘misrepresenting’ her, and addresses her background and that cucumber ‘brain fart’ incident
Hilaria Baldwin has accused critics of “misrepresenting” her amid allegations she spent years faking being Spanish.
Speaking out in a New York Times interview on Wednesday, Baldwin addressed the controversy surrounding her heritage after it emerged she was born in Boston, not Spain, and was originally named Hillary.
Continue reading...I’m still no Jimi Hendrix, but after a year’s solid practice I have just about mastered one R&B track
This year, my original new year resolution was to be a two-pronged attack on my unhealthy lifestyle in the form of restrictions on booze and food. Sadly, that was waylaid by the unavoidable catastrophe of coronavirus, paired with the wildly avoidable catastrophe of Boris Johnson being prime minister.
Given that we have been trapped in our homes, I had to rapidly reimagine my ambitions. Without the assistance of chicken so deep fried it practically becomes a sedative, or the sweet embrace of red wine, I suspect I would not have been able to cope with 2020.
Continue reading...A terrible year is finally over but are we really in the mood to party? The Guardia Australian team reflect on how they’ll be marking 2020’s demise – please join us in the comments with your own plans and suggestions
In many ways, the end of this terrible year deserves the biggest, loudest and most cathartic party of all time. In a pandemic, of course, that was never going to happen – but it seems to be the last thing many want to do anyway.
When asked how they’d be marking New Year’s Eve – amid Covid restrictions, bad weather and general 2020 exhaustion – many people on Twitter shared the same sentiment: they would not be doing much. One is looking forward to “a quiet night with my dogs”; another a “rousing boardgame”; a third replied: “glass of wine, bed early.”
Continue reading...In March, our house was a cold, rubble-strewn building site. As supply chains broke down, it became clear we wouldn’t be moving back any time soon
My wife is a goal-oriented person. When she learns, it is deliberate. For her, lockdown presented an opportunity, so she began learning Danish. I didn’t. I am deeply lazy: as I sit here writing, I am staring at an empty packet of Wotsits that has been sitting by my laptop for three hours; the bin is 6ft away. The notion of actively learning something seemed a bit needless. Why waste all that time when I could be doing nothing?
I did learn something, though. I learned that I love my home, which came as a surprise. I guess there is nothing quite like being trapped outside your house, as we were, to make you appreciate it rather more.
Continue reading...I feared isolation, sleep deprivation and an end to the activities that had been keeping me well. I never expected to be filled with such love and wonder
I hadn’t expected to have a baby. But when I turned out to be wrong about that, I found myself expecting the whole thing to be a disaster. It wasn’t just that people tend to be rather negative about what early parenthood entails, focusing on the sleepless nights and endless nappy changes. It was also because I had a mental illness that I thought would make it impossible for me to cope at all, let alone enjoy motherhood. Neither had I expected to be giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, in which I would be cut off from much of my support network.
In the three years since I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of a serious trauma in my personal life, I had spent a great deal of time trying to work out how to manage my illness. I planned my weeks around activities that research told me would help mend my mind a little. I knew that cold-water swimming, for instance, appears to help us control the fight-or-flight instinct that often goes so awry in mental illness. I knew that running could encourage the body to produce chemicals that lift the mood. I had discovered that birdwatching and looking for wild flowers were much more effective for me than mindfulness apps, with their calls to sit in silence in a room. I had just written a book about the healing power of outdoor pursuits and was starting to feel mildly in control of my life.
Continue reading...The pandemic couldn’t put a stop to pretentious restaurants or angry chefs – but can you tell which was which?
Before we had a pandemic to stress about, bakers in southern India entered Guinness World Records by baking the world’s longest cake. Roughly how long was it?
65 metres
650 metres
6.5km
65km
According to a spoof WhatsApp message that went viral in March, why was the government about to requisition Wembley stadium?
To turn it into a food bank
To host its own version of Bake Off
To cook the world’s biggest lasagne
To use as storage for the nation’s leftover sourdough
Muse in Belgravia, London, was this year labelled the most pretentious restaurant in Britain. Which of these is not a real item on the menu?
Conquering the beech tree (langoustine, pork fat, burnt apple)
Neither black nor white (cauliflower panna cotta, pickled gold raisins, caviar)
A date with Pablo (’nduja, thyme mist, polenta)
Mother’s puzzle (lemon, fennel pollen, yogurt)
Which public figure did Donuts Delite in Rochester, New York, pay tribute to with a special doughnut bearing their likeness?
Donald Trump
Bernie Sanders
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Dr Anthony Fauci
This year the Guardian ran a widely commented on guide to making the perfect burger at home. According to Honest Burger’s Tom Barton, where should the pickle in a burger go?
Under the meat patty
Above the meat patty but under the cheese
Outside the bun, as a side accompaniment only
In the bin – there’s no place for pickles on a burger
What started going missing from boxes of Quality Street after Covid-19 disrupted production lines?
The chocolate caramel brownie
The purple hazelnut caramel
Wrappers around each individual chocolate
The orange one that no one likes anyway
This year Kraft was accused of “sexualising mac’n’cheese”. What had it done?
Placed billboards featuring models bathing in the creamy pasta dish
Set up a promotion encouraging fans to “send noodz”
Added “sexy” anthropomorphic pasta shapes to the package design
Mistakenly advertised its snacks on a pornographic website
What was described by this newspaper as “Jamie’s Oliver’s worst nightmare”?
An EU law banning the use of the word “pukka” on food items
Toploader splitting up
Uber Eats getting banned from delivering on Vespas
The return of the Turkey Twizzler
Who did chef Tom Kerridge blast as “selfish” and “disgraceful”?
Dominic Cummings
Customers who fail to show up for their reservations
Diners who refuse to socially distance
People who don’t tip
Which would-be food critic came out with the unforgettable take down: “One thing I will say about Italy in general … the food is actually shocking! It’s meant to be the home of pizza and pasta and I really can’t see how”?
Selling Sunset’s Chrishell Stause
Fitness guru Joe Wicks
Love Island’s Molly-Mae Hague
Nigel Farage
2020 saw the return of the “wine window” … but what is it?
A tiny crack in a wine bottle that allows the precious drink to seep out undetected
A house window that uses bottle-green instead of clear glass
A hole in a wall through which wine can be passed to people on the street
The brief period of time in which parents can have a sneaky glass while their kids are napping
11 and above.
100%! You deserve a (socially distanced) meal out to celebrate!
8 and above.
You’ve clearly spent isolation gorging yourself stupid (on food knowledge)
0 and above.
Oh dear, have you spent your year eating nothing but homemade sourdough?
4 and above.
Your correct answers came around as often as an Ocado slot during lockdown
Continue reading...She was the face of popular culture, but then Fearne Cotton reached crisis point. Now she has found her voice again...
Fearne Cotton keeps a pile of notebooks next to her computer, each brimming with plans for projects. Many of us have struggled to focus during the pandemic, but for Cotton, the past nine months have been among the most productive of her professional life. “I’ve found this time really creative,” she says, in that presenter voice of hers, so soothingly familiar. “It’s like when I go on holiday. In moments I’m forced to do nothing, I find this clarity.”
It’s 10am on a grey December morning when we meet over Zoom and her schedule, when she takes me through it, sounds exhausting. Her lockdowns have been busy. She’s written two books since the pandemic started and has kept up her popular wellness podcast, Happy Place, alongside her weekly Radio 2 show. And though the second instalment of her annual summer wellness event, Happy Place Festival, could have become another Covid casualty, Cotton and her team took the programme online. She juggled all this with home schooling her kids.
Continue reading...Losing your libido is a symptom, not a life sentence
The dilemma I am a 52-year-old woman who has had a difficult perimenopause. I have read extensively on the subject and tried various supplements to ease this transition. My experience has included hot flushes, night sweats, depression, anxiety, insomnia and heavy periods. I was suffering the most debilitating anxiety to the point where I could barely function. I am on bio-identical HRT (Oestragel and Utrogestan), but these had little effect in easing the symptoms. I had no choice but to take antidepressants even though my symptoms were due to hormone fluctuations.
As a side effect my libido fell drastically (a healthy sex life had been maintained until this point and I have always found it easy to orgasm). What I did not expect was that my clitoris physically shrunk and orgasms become almost impossible to achieve.
Continue reading...