After being promoted by US bloggers and Instagram, cottage cheese sales are now up 40% in the UK. Its blandness is befitting of the times

While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).

Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.

The comedian on how he rates his cooking skills, food disasters and the link between the chicken restaurant and David Attenborough

Growing up, our big treat was that once a month we’d go to Pizza Hut. Me and my brother would think about it all the time: Pizza Hut; salad buffet; Ice Cream Factory. Until The Simpsons came out on VHS, it did not get any better than that.

Restaurants are the closest thing to a family business. Because it was my grandad’s racket: he ran Indian restaurants in Leicester in the 1980s. His last job before he retired was running a greasy spoon, like a proper English greasy spoon, which I always thought was a triumph of cultural integration.

From haggis to spicy chorizo, offbeat crisp flavours tasted and rated

£1.50 (150g), sainsburys.co.uk
Quite a heavy crisp, you feel like you’re going to get your money’s worth. Texturally excellent; strong ridges. It tastes pure paprika-y. Very satisfying.
★★★★

Low-price deals in UK mean consumers are eating less-nourishing food more frequently, say experts

Office workers looking for a cheap lunch on the high street might struggle. With inflation pushing up prices in recent years, a sandwich, snack and drink at popular coffee chains can now cost upwards of £10, while even the average supermarket meal deal has risen by more than 21% in price since before the pandemic.

But now fast-food chains have moved to fill the gap in the market. In March, KFC introduced a new lunch deal for £5.49, offering a fried chicken wrap with a drink and side – either crisps or a cookie – and available from Monday to Friday until 3pm. “KFC is now workplace appropriate, for when finger lickin’ is not,” the chain said in its promotional material.

Make up a big batch of tahini sauce with herbs, quick preserved lemons, experiment with all sorts of pestos, or try zhoug and shatta, two punchy Levantine chilli condiments

I love the green tahini sauce with the roast cauliflower in your book Simple – it livens up even the most joyless of midweek meals. What other easy sauces should I have in my repertoire to give plain dishes a bit of zhoosh?
Joe, Liverpool
I’m so pleased you’ve asked this question, Joe, because sauces and pastes are one of the secrets to exciting home cooking. They’re little flavour bombs, sitting ready in the fridge, to drizzle over or stir into all sorts.

Tahini sauce, green or otherwise, is one of my favourites. If I don’t have herbs at home, or if I just fancy a change, I’ll often mix in some miso or soy for a deep, savoury hit. Or, if I want some chilli heat, I’ll add chilli flakes, harissa or similar chilli pastes such as doubanjiang and gochujang; just remember to add plenty of lemon or lime juice to balance things out.

There was more business than usual and some bemused regulars after El Califa de León was rewarded for its ‘exceptional’ offering

El Califa de León, an unassuming taco joint in Mexico City, measures just 3 metres by 3 metres and has space for only about six people to stand at a squeeze. Locals usually wait for 5 minutes between ordering and picking up their food.

All that changed on Wednesday, however, when it became the first Mexican taco stand ever to win a Michelin star, putting it in the exalted company of fine dining restaurants around the world, and drawing crowds like it has never seen.

Eight-year-olds’ video, which racked up 14m views, hits a sore point for mobilers who have struggled with the cost of living

Like the totemic £8 pint or £5 coffee, the cost of a Mr Whippy ice-cream has become a barometer of a world gone mad. But really, nine quid for two ice-creams? Bloody hell.

That was the damning verdict of an eight-year-old whose TikTok rant over the cost of two screwballs from an ice cream van in the park has racked up 14m views at the time of writing.

Cannes film festival
Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons

Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.

An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.

Enlarge / Dispensers for Charged Lemondade, a caffeinated lemonade drink, at Panera Bread, Walnut Creek, California, March 27, 2023. (credit: Getty | Smith Collection/Gado)

Panera Bread will stop selling its highly caffeinated "Charged" drinks, which have been the subject of at least three lawsuits and linked to at least two deaths.

It is unclear when exactly the company will pull the plug on the potent potables, but in a statement to Ars Tuesday, Panera said it was undergoing a "menu transformation" that includes an "enhanced beverage portfolio." The company plans to roll out various new drinks, including a lemonade and tea, but a spokesperson confirmed that the new flavors would not contain added caffeine as the "charged" drinks did.

The fast-casual cafe-style chain drew national attention in 2022 for the unexpectedly high caffeine levels in the drinks, which were initially offered as self-serve with free refills.

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