Art | Get your Daily Dose

Treat your consumption of art the way you treat your consumption of food and you’ll soon see how a diet of music, art, theatre or literature can make you feel happier and healthier

Work out your 5-a-day. Decide on a simple rule you can apply to your life to make sure you engage with the arts every day. Maybe it’s 10 minutes of creative writing or sketching, or listening to a new audiobook or piece of music. A daily creative practice will activate some of the core mechanisms like stress reduction, self-esteem boost and give you a cognitive workout.

Plan your art treats like you would a restaurant. Set aside the time to go to a gallery or museum once a month. Book tickets for a show or play as a treat to look forward to. These activities will bring important ingredients like socialising and novelty that are beneficial to health.

Experiment with flavours. Try to mix things up with diverse activities that will give you the greatest possible exposure to the different benefits.

Be mindful. Take time out to savour even the background arts experiences. When you switch the radio on, sit down and listen for a few minutes, when you’re making art, spend at least some of the time being entirely present, thinking only of what you’re creating.

Avoid the UPFs (ultra processed foods). Screen-based arts are proliferating but the evidence base for them has been weaker. Use them strategically but try to make your art engagement real not virtual where you can.

Identify your chicken soup. We all have a food that we believe will get us better – work out what your equivalent is for when you’re stressed, tired or unwell and use music, books, arts or craft activities to look forward to and lift your mood.

The above blog is an extract from our feature ‘The Art of Living’, which is all about how the arts can help you to survive and thrive. You can read the rest of the feature in our October issue, which is in shops now.

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Recipe | Homemade Pretzels

Photography by Ula Soltys

Soft, chewy and great with a beer, homemade pretzels are the best way to kick off an Oktoberfest-at-home celebration

Makes 10

Ingredients

7g yeast

1 tbsp sugar

14g butter, melted

1 tsp salt

500g flour (approx)

120g baking soda

Coarse sea salt, for topping

To make

1 Whisk the yeast and sugar into 360ml warm water in a bowl. Cover and rest for 1 min.

2 Whisk in the melted butter and salt, then add 375g of the flour. Mix with a wooden spoon until combined. Add 95g more flour (if necessary) until the dough is tacky and pulls away from the side of the bowl. If still sticky, add up to 30g more flour, 1 tbsp at a time.

3 Knead by hand on a lightly floured surface for around 5 mins. If the dough gets too sticky, sprinkle
1 tsp of flour on the work surface to make a soft, slightly tacky, dough. Your dough will be ready to rise when it slowly bounces back when you poke it.

4 Shape the kneaded dough into a ball and return to the bowl, then cover with a damp tea towel. Leave to rise for around 30 mins.

5 Preheat the oven to 200C/Fan 180C/Gas 6. Line two baking trays with baking paper.

6 Use a sharp knife and divide the dough into 10 sections, roughly 80g each.

7 Roll each section into a 50cm-long rope. Form a circle with the dough by bringing the two ends together at the top of the circle. Twist the ends together. Bring the twisted ends back down the centre of the circle towards yourself and press them down to form a pretzel shape.

8 Bring the baking soda and 2 ltr of water to the boil in a large pot. Drop one pretzel at a time into the boiling water for 20-30 secs. (Any longer and the pretzel will have a metallic taste.) Using a slotted spatula, lift the pretzel out of the water, allowing excess water to drip off, and place on the baking paper. Repeat this with the remaining pretzels.

9 Sprinkle the top of the pretzels with the sea salt. Bake for 12-15 mins, or until golden brown. Serve warm.

Recipes and styling by Anneliese Klos and Liz Boyd. Buy this month's The Simple Things -buy, download or subscribe

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Home | Famous Fictional Kitchens

The kitchen represents the heart of the home for most of us but some kitchens just stay in our hearts for ever. Here are a few kitchens from books, film and television you might recall…

The Darling Buds of May, 1990s

Is there a more quintessentially country kitchen than that of Ma and Pop Larkin? A baby blue and maroon 1950s post-war kitchen (in a 18th-century farmhouse) and a table laden with Ma’s freshly made pies and Pop’s bottle of whisky. Perfick.

Amelie, 2001

The mismatched, oh-so Parisian kitchen of Amélie Poulain in this cult French film is as idiosyncratic as the main character herself. Note the red and minty green palette, checkerboard tiles, formica table, vintage posters and traditional French cookware.

Ozark, 2017

An authentic mid-century galley kitchen with fluted glass cabinets, stainless steel sink and huge hatch to the living room, where the Byrde family conduct hushed rows and hatch money laundering plans over enormous glasses of wine.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, 1948

This novel throws us straight into the 1930s kitchen of a tumbledown castle. Cassandra Mortmain tells us “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. The rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea cosy,” as she writes in her journal. 

Bridget Jones’s Diary, 2017

What you make of Bridget’s kitchen in the original novel is of course your own business but that super cosy kitchen from the original film is the kitchen we all wanted to own. While Bridget was lamenting her blue soup we were all planning to repaint our cupboards light blue, invest in a red worktop and add fairy lights to recreate that fun, bohemian kitchen. V good. 

Downton Abbey, 2010-2015

Stepping into Mrs Patmore and Daisy’s below-stairs servants’ kitchen is like a tour of a National Trust property. Copper pans glimmering on the shelves in the half-light, huge flagstone tiles and that enormous range cooker. Who wouldn’t want to steal five minutes for a cup of tea at that wooden prep table?

The Tiger Who Came to Tea, 1968

The backdrop for the story of the Tiger who popped in for a snack and then drank all the water in the taps and all of Daddy’s beer is based on children’s author Judith Kerr’s real kitchen. A section of it is now housed in the Seven Stories museum in Newcastle. The yellow worktop, white Formica cupboards and blue and white tiles are iconic now and featured in several of her books, including Mog the Forgetful Cat. 

If you’d like to step back in time into some more iconic kitchens, you’ll want to read our feature ‘What’s Cooking’ in our October issue, which looks at the fascinating history of the kitchen.

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Project | Make a Sauna Hat

Looking like a Victorian candle snuffer, bell-shaped sauna hats protect hair and prevent overheating, so you can spend longer in the sauna.

You will need:

Thick 100% wool felt sheets, heavy-duty needle, strong cotton thread, paper

Pattern: Measure your head circumference and divide by four. Add 2cm for seams. Draw a 24cm-high petal shape on paper matching this band width.

Cut: Pin the pattern to the felt. Cut four identical panels as well as a 2cm x 10cm loop strip.

Pin: Align side edges of two panels, right sides inward, and pin the curve. Repeat for the other pair.

Sew: Stitch the pinned edges with a 1cm seam. Open both halves, then place them face toface, matching the top.

Finish: Fold the loop strip, tucking it inside the top peak. Pin and sew the final curve. Turn right-side out, leaving the bottom edge raw.

This project is from our October ‘Almanac’ pages, which each month suggests things for you to note and notice, plan and do.

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Recipe | Chicken Noodle Soup

As the season turns and winter bugs lurk around the corner, chicken noodle soup is the first thing you’ll want to make when you have a fresh batch of chicken stock

This warming noodle soup is like a hug in a bowl. Umami from the mushrooms and tamari, warmth from the garlic and ginger, but still fresh thanks to the coriander and rice vinegar. Don’t skip the jammy sesame egg!

Serves 2

2 eggs
1 tsp sesame seeds
80g frozen edamame
50g shiitake mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and grated
½ fresh red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped (or chilli flakes)
1ltr chicken stock
Splash tamari
Splash brown rice vinegar
Splash fish sauce
200g brown rice udon noodles
200g cooked shredded chicken
2 spring onions, finely sliced
Small handful coriander, chopped

1 Boil the eggs (6 mins for a jammy yolk). Then cool, peel, halve and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Set aside.

2 Place the frozen edamame in a bowl and pour over boiling water to thaw whilst you make the soup.

3 Heat a large pan over a low-medium heat and gently fry the mushrooms in a little olive oil for around 8 mins until golden. Remove and set aside. In the same pan, add the sesame oil, garlic, ginger and chilli and fry for 1 min or so, making sure it doesn’t catch.

4 Pour in the chicken stock and bring to the boil. As soon as it starts to bubble, turn down to a gentle simmer and add in a splash each of the tamari, rice vinegar and fish sauce, then give it a taste to see if you need to add any more. Add in the noodles and cook for the time specified on the packet.

5 In the final 5 mins, add in the shredded chicken to heat through.

6 To serve, carefully divide the noodle soup between two large bowls and top with the mushrooms, spring onions, edamame, coriander and your sesame egg.

Cook’s note: If you don’t have tamari you can use dark soy sauce instead.

This recipe is just one of the ideas featured in our ‘A Good Life’ pages in our October issue. Each season, Michelle Tansley (@myderbyshirelife) shows us what she’s growing in her cottage garden, harvesting from her veg patch and cooking in her kitchen. This month she is also sharing recipes for a simple chicken stock, butternut squash and blue cheese pearl barley risotto, warm spiced apple juice and apple & blackberry crumble with fig leaf custard.

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Playlist | Autumn twilight

DJ: Frances Ambler
Illustration: Anneliese Klos

Our October playlist is inspired by autumn twilight hours. Have a listen on Spotify here.

We make a playlist for each issue of The Simple Things. You can read a piece exploring the magic of twilight in our October RELISH issue, on sale from 28 September 2026.