Lifestyle - Tuesday, April 14, 2026

The chocolate malt powder is sold in more than 40 countries, and Australian cafe owners say there’s ‘jingoistic pride’ in serving it on their menus Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email When I order the jumbo-sized Milo Godzilla at Ho Jiak in Sydney’s Haymarket, it arrives as advertised – it’s comically large. The Malaysian restaurant prepares the drink by swirling Milo powder with hot water, adding sweet drizzles of condensed milk then chilling the mix with ice. Scoops of ice-cream are added and extra choc-malt powder is showered on top. Served in a one-litre jug, it’s so big I can’t finish it solo: staff hand me three takeaway cups to transport the leftovers. Like many beloved Milo drinks, the Godzilla is native to south-east Asia. Without ice-cream, it’s essentially a Milo Dinosaur: an iced Milo heavily sprinkled with more of the choc-malt grains and served everywhere from Malaysian market stalls to Indian-Muslim restaurants in Singapore. Continue reading...

Don’t worry about making or buying salad dressing. Toss your salad with lemon juice and olive oil, and call it a day.

Get rid of ‘forever chemicals’. Here are our top plastic-free kitchen swaps to help you safely prep, cook, store and clean The six best plastic-free cutting boards in the US for 2026, tested Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things Microplastics in our cutting boards . “Forever chemicals” in our pans . How did cooking a simple meal start to feel so fraught? Lately, concerns around toxins in the kitchen have only gotten louder. A steady stream of research and broad cultural attention (see: Netflix’s semi-alarmist new documentary The Plastic Detox ) are spotlighting how plastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas) could be contaminating our food. Even the Environmental Protection Agency recently moved to classify microplastics as drinking water contaminants . The best non-toxic pan: Our Place Titanium Always Pan Pro The best microplastic-free cutting board: Material Kitchen MK Free Board Continue reading...

A cake you’ll crave all day. The post This Orange Almond Cake Is My Latest Excuse to Eat Dessert for Breakfast appeared first on Camille Styles .

Don’t be scared of cooked rice: our experts share safe ways to turn yesterday’s leftovers into something delicious How do I store cooked rice safely, and what can I make with it the next day? Michael, by email “It’s a bit of a running joke with rice, because I think of all the people in China who aren’t spreading their leftover rice immediately on to a tray to cool and are still alive,” says Amy Poon, of Poon’s at Somerset House in London. “But I have to be responsible and say: cool the rice as quickly as possible, within the hour, and put it in an airtight container and pop it in the fridge [or freezer] straight away.” The reason being, as food science guru Harold McGee notes in his bible On Food & Cooking , “Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus , which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins. The spores can tolerate high temperatures, and some survive cooking.” In short: good storage practices will prevent bacterial growth, not to mention open a whole world of dinner opportunities. “Rice is the most versatile grain to have around as extras,” confirms Ping Coombes, author of Rice , but there’s another benefit, too. “When rice cools, the molecules rearrange into tighter bonds in a process called retrogradation.” This, Coombes continues, creates resistant starch, and the more resistant the starch, the slower the release of energy. “Eating chilled, pre-cooked rice makes it release sugar molecules into the blood stream more slowly, promoting the feelings of fullness for longer and preventing big variations of blood sugar.” But back to Michael’s prospective meals. Continue reading...

Legend has it that Fatou was brought from Africa to France in the late 1950s by a sailor who then traded her to settle a bar bill.

When I looked around that room, at all the marriages, love affairs and divorces, everything and everyone was as you would have expected back in 2001 ... An army dude once told me, “A speech should be like a lady’s skirt: short enough to be interesting, long enough to cover the main points”, and I said, “Wait, can we just clarify what the main points of a lady are – is it her butt or some other, nearby part?”. He pretended not to hear me. Or to be fair, maybe he was a bit deaf and that’s how feminism came to pass him by. Few would disagree with the principle, though – whatever you want to say, keep it brief. But yesterday I went to a 25th wedding anniversary, where I would have loved for the speeches to be 10 times as long. I could have listened to them all day. The couple looked pretty much exactly the same as they did 25 years ago, which was mysterious and diverting, but that’s not what gave heft to what they said. Rather, whatever endearing thing they said about each another, the quarter century that just flew by was proof that it was real. Comparing it to a wedding speech, it was like the difference between a huckster at a Ted Talk telling you that one day you wouldn’t need to sleep because you’d have a sleep-robot inside your brain, and a real scientist explaining how she’d discovered the cure for cancer. Continue reading...

Rena Effendi attempts to find the species named after her wayward, womanising father – and a connection to the man she never knew – in this moving documentary Photojournalist Rena Effendi’s father was famous in the world of butterflies; he was a lepidopterist who spent seven years hunting one species. Effendi remarks drily that seven years was longer than Rustam Effendi lasted in any of his four – possibly more – marriages. (When asked for a precise headcount of wives, his old friend answers: “God knows!”) Effendi was 14 when her father died; he had been a mostly absent presence during her childhood, and had another family while being married to her mother. At his funeral, she remembers only women around his coffin. Years later, she discovered from his Wikipedia page that he had a butterfly named after him, the rare and endangered Satyrus effendi . This gentle, perceptive documentary follows Effendi as she searches for the elusive butterfly, which flies for just two weeks a year high in the Caucasus mountains – and chases her father’s ghost. Her mother is evasive, saying only that she would have forgiven Rustam almost anything. Effendi’s first hurdle on her mission to catch the butterfly is obtaining permission to travel to its habitat, on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Effendi is Azerbaijani; her father died just as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, after which tensions exploded between Armenia and Azerbaijan and war broke out. There is now a fragile peace . Continue reading...

Letter writer is weirded out by strangers replying to girlfriend’s posts about them.

This skillet dinner features tender chicken breasts and crisp snap peas in a creamy sauce studded with sautéed mushrooms and shallot, and flavored with tarragon, garlic and mustard.