simple

Simple sardines in the Algarve

Last August, the smoky aroma of grilled sardines drifting over the beach in Portimão woke me up from my sunbathing on the beach. Attracted by the aroma of barbecued fish, we found ourselves in the old port where, for €12, I was served two delicious sandwiches on rustic bread of sardines in garlic and olive oil, with a small cold beer. I sat down, ate and chatted with locals on benches at simple communal tables. The important thing seemed to be to enjoy food together. The next morning, a reenactment of the fishing boats arriving loaded with fish, as they once were, was a real spectacle – complete with guitar playing, drum-banging and excited seagulls whirling and wailing above in the hope of a feast. Later, concerts and dancing animated the town as the party for the sardine festival went on well into the night. Cooking demos and dishes including sardine-based soup and salads, added to the enjoyment. I never imagined such pleasure could be had from the simple sardine.
Joe

A family dinner in the Faroe Islands

My wife and I visited the Faroe Islands a few years ago, where we took part in heimablídni, a concept where traditional Faroese food is served in a home. We found it to be one of the best ways to experience the Faroes and a unique experience to share a meal with a local family. Homecooked dishes showcase ingredients from the surrounding sea and mountains. We were served smoked salmon from the host’s own smoker, lamb, potatoes and traditional specialities, all accompanied with great conversation about Faroese life and traditions. Sitting around a family table makes the experience feel personal and authentic.
Mike

A vegan feast in Sicily

As a vegan who loves trying local cuisine, the combination of warm hospitality and a high proportion of locals with a lactose intolerance makes Sicily the ideal foodie getaway. Having hiked to the top of Monte Pellegrino in 35C heat, we popped into a small nondescript street-food shop (the only place that was open) and were delighted to find panelle – delicious crispy chickpea-flour fritters served in sesame bread. We ate them overlooking Palermo harbour. That evening, we tried Haiku, a vegan restaurant with reimagined classics based on dishes such as carbonara and tiramisu. It was so good we kept ordering more and more courses until we could barely move.
Esther

Strong spirits and small plates in Greece

The city of Volos is famous for its Tsipouradika – tavernas that serve tsipouro, a strong spirit made from pomace, the stems, skins and seeds that are left over from wine making. It comes plain or infused with botanicals and anise, and is served with ice and water. Each glass you order arrives with a different small plate or meze. It could be grilled peppers, sundried octopus, a spicy cheese spread or smoked mackerel. You take pot luck as to what the patron fancies dishing up that day.
Barbara

The perfect snack to pair with Lithuanian beer

In Vilnius, we came across the ultimate food pairing for the fantastic beers available there in the form of kepta duona – deep-fried rye bread with garlic and cheese. Every bar has a slightly different version – raw, roast or confit garlic with cream, melted or simply grated cheese. A heavenly snack that could easily become your main meal.
Natalie

Vegan delights in the patisseries of Paris

Being an unfortunate combination of a foodie and a vegan, I was prepared for a weekend of staring longingly into patisserie windows when heading to Paris earlier this summer. I was not prepared for the unbridled joy awaiting me at the Land & Monkeys boulangeries/patisseries scattered across the capital. It began with an outrageously creamy raspberry petit gateaux from its Montmartre branch, followed by the unbelievable fluff and flake of a croissant aux champignons in the Marais the next day. A parting madeleine for the Eurostar on our last day was the pièce de résistance.
Elinor

Pasta with pears in Bologna

It was in Bologna, Italy’s self-proclaimed food capital, where I sampled the city’s signature dish of tortellini. We stumbled across Rosarose Bistrot, enticed by tables with red-checked cloths set in the middle of a cobblestone road. I enjoyed shells stuffed with tangy gorgonzola cheese and chunks of caramelised pears, a fruit I would usually avoid, but I placed trust in the regional delicacy. The fruit’s sweetness blended harmoniously with the strong cheese flavour; crispy and soft fried bread known as crescentine, was used to soak up the remaining sauce. It was only right to mark this culinary experience with a small tortellini keyring from a nearby gift shop, filled with various merchandise emblazoned with the pasta shell.
Caitlin

Catalonia’s ultimate slow-food festival

Last year, I discovered the ultimate slow-food festival – the Snail Feast of Lleida (L’Aplec del Caragol), 100 miles west of Barcelona. Over a long weekend, there was music, dancing, cooking and feasting, all in celebration of the tiny mollusc. Entrance to the festival is free, and visitors can enjoy traditional snail dishes in tents, local restaurants or simply in the town squares. I had two helpings of snails a la gormanda, cooked in a sauce of spicy paprika and herbs. Since attending the festival, I have been treading carefully in my garden in case I harm what I discovered are delicate and delicious creatures.
Helen

Heavenly cakes in Slovenia

Having travelled by train from Bristol down through the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, we reached our penultimate stop, Lake Bled. We’d been awed by the beautiful Swiss alpine scenery, but Bled took it up a notch. After a day of cycling from Bled to Lake Bohinj and back, we refuelled on the local delicacy, Bled cake, a sumptuously smooth set custard encased in the lightest of mille-feuille pastry and topped with whipped cream. Imagine an English custard slice, only a million times better. It was so welcome after a day in the Slovenian mountain air, we made it a holiday habit. A Bled cake a day until we had to come home!
Sara

Winning tip: delicious seafood soup in Spain

Few meals linger in the memory like a proper Asturian sopa de pescado y marisco (seafood soup). After kayaking 10 miles down the Sella River, my reward in the town of Arriondas wasn’t a humble bowl of soup – it was a whole pan! Every flavour shone through in a broth packed with white fish, prawns and sweet crab claws, so extraordinarily rich it almost brought me to tears. I devoured it all, skipping the rest of the courses without regret. Years later in Gijón, history repeated itself. Even my soup-sceptical husband declared it the best he had ever tasted. In Asturias, fish soup isn’t a starter. It’s an obsession in a pot.
Oksana

DOLLY Parton has been laid to rest in a private funeral attended by her family.

The country music great was buried next to husband Carl Dean on Friday at the Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville, Tennessee.

Their shared memorial bears both names, an image of two interlocking wedding rings, and the inscription “Married May 30, 1966”.

The send-off was “very simple” and what “Dolly would have wanted”, sources said.

The Sun last week revealed that the country music star wanted to have her dad’s favourite song If We Never Meet Again (This Side of Heaven) played at the service.

Dolly’s great-niece, Lainey Mae Parton, gave an emotional tribute confirming the burial had taken place.

READ MORE ON DOLLY PARTON

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The superstar’s family have not yet released an official statement.

Lainey, 20, wrote on Saturday: “I wanted to wait until after my granny was laid to rest yesterday before I tried to put any of this into words.”

She said she knew the star as “Aunt Granny”, a name that captured the central role Dolly played within her enormous family.

Lainey explained that although Dolly and Carl never had children, she made the younger members of the family feel like they belonged to her.

She added: “She loved us that way and I’ll forever be grateful for that.”

Lainey also said Dolly — who died last Tuesday aged 80 after a brief battle with cancer — helped pay for her beauty school education and encouraged her musical ambitions.

Full funeral details have not been publicly released.

Dolly’s husband of nearly 59 years, Carl, 82, died last year.

An obituary posted by Woodlawn Memorial Park remembered “her timeless music and prolific songwriting, but also her wit, warmth, and kindness that made us all feel like family”.

An issue everyone has faced at one time or the other led to a nightmare for Karen Cassidy, after tour operator Jet2 cancelled her entire booking due to the ‘no-show’

A mum who overslept and missed her holiday flight to Spain was left “in tears” after discovering that her entire all-inclusive package holiday had been cancelled without her knowledge. Karen Cassidy and her husband George Gale had been due to fly out to Malaga at just after 7am on August 14 but overslept.

Karen explained: “The baby had kept me up so I don’t think I ended up going to sleep until 2:00am then we were supposed to get up at 4:00am but just slept through our alarms.”

As soon as she realised that that they had missed their flight, Karen wasted no time in getting ‘straight on the internet’ and booked an alternative flight to Malaga for that afternoon.

But after finally arriving at the hotel at midnight, the “exhausted” mum-of-three, 36, says she was left “in tears” to discover her entire all-inclusive package holiday had been cancelled.

After calling holiday organisers Jet2 and “crying for 20 minutes” Karen says she was told there was “absolutely nothing they could do” and she had to pay another €350 (£300) to stay the night in the hotel.

Karen says that she and George ended up paying over £1,500 for alternative accommodation and travel – meaning the cost of their £1,114 family holiday ballooned to more than £2,600.

Sharing her experience on TikTok, Karen wants to raise awareness so that other people don’t make the same mistake she did.

She explained: “Our new flight was around 4:00pm then we were delayed for over an hour so by the time we got to the hotel it was midnight. Obviously they were like ‘we can’t find your booking.’ Then they explained ‘actually there is a booking but it’s a past booking.’ Jet2 had cancelled our entire holiday at 3pm.

“After everything I felt we had gone through, I was just shocked.”

A spokesperson for Jet2holidays said: “We’re sorry to hear about Ms Cassidy and Mr Gale’s experience and we understand how disappointing it must have been to arrive in Malaga and find that their holiday arrangements had been cancelled.

“Unfortunately, as the customers did not travel on their booked outbound flight or let us know that they planned to make their own way to Malaga, their remaining holiday arrangements were cancelled in line with the terms and conditions of their booking. When they got in touch with us after arriving in resort, our team offered to try to help and support them.”

Karen said that when they finally arrived at they hotel she was “exhausted and just in tears.”

She explained: ”They [Jet2] came back to me and said there’s absolutely nothing they can do, they have a no-show policy, because it’s been cancelled, they can’t go back on that.”

They had arrived at their hotel so late, Karen added, that they had very few alternatives. ”At this time, midnight, we don’t have that luxury option of going to shop around,” she said.

Karen shared her story on TikTok, saying that even though she had received critical comments from some other users, she wanted to make others aware of what she called Jet2’s “unclear” policy. She continued: “Through loads of rubbish comments from people calling me an idiot or people saying ‘what grown up can miss a flight’, there’s hundreds of people that don’t know.

“If I could save one person, I’m happy.”

Gaza City — Rabab Deifallah sits inside her tent, clutching a small, battered lighter. She presses it once, then again, trying to produce a spark strong enough to ignite a pile of wood inside a stove.

The mother of five has carefully looked after the lighter. Her son has repaired it several times since it became difficult to buy a new one after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Firewood has become essential for 46-year-old Rabab. She uses it to bake bread, heat water for her children, prepare food and make tea amid shortages of cooking gas and soaring fuel prices.

“Our whole daily life depends on fire,” Rabab told Al Jazeera. “But getting a fire started begins with a lighter and this small object has become one of the hardest things to find in Gaza.”

Before the war, lighters were so cheap and readily available that she remembers buying three for one shekel ($0.33). Today, a new lighter can cost between $27-33 and Rabab last spent $12 to repair her old lighter.

“Should I spend that amount on a lighter, or should I buy a bag of flour?” she asked.

Palestinians in Gaza would rather spend their limited money on food, so a single lighter is often passed around families in several tents.

Some days, Rabab cannot find a lighter at all, so her family has been forced to spend days eating cold food or waiting until a neighbour has a fire burning to borrow a spark.

She often sends a piece of cardboard to a neighbour to get a light off their fire and bring it home. Other times, if a neighbour is baking bread, she may ask to use their oven to prepare food for her family.

The lighter is now something she guards carefully, as it is, for her, the starting point for fire, food, bread and hot water.

A second struggle

Nearby, Hasnaa Mansour, 43, faces the same problem but from a different angle.

Displaced from Jabalia refugee camp, Hasnaa sits beside a clay oven she had treasured since her family’s financial situation deteriorated during the war.

Her husband previously worked as a tailor and the family lived relatively comfortably, but due to a lack of business, Hasnaa now bakes and sells food to help support their six children.

Hasnaa has repeatedly repaired her lighter because buying a new one is beyond her means.

But a shortage of cooking gas has made the problem even worse.

“With gas, all you need is a small spark to light it. But with the oven, I need a real fire,” she said.

“I’ve been sitting here since the morning and by 10 o’clock I still couldn’t light the oven. I sent my young daughter with a piece of cardboard to look for someone who had a fire burning, but she couldn’t find anyone.”

Restrictions and shortages

The lighter shortage comes amid Israel’s continued siege on Gaza.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says restrictions on the movement of goods and closures of crossings have contributed to shortages and rising prices of essential supplies. OCHA also says items classified by Israeli authorities as “dual-use” face additional difficulties in obtaining approval to enter Gaza.

The Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in June that restrictions on crossings and the mechanisms for bringing commercial shipments into Gaza continued to limit the flow of goods.

It said that more than 30,000 trucks entered Gaza during the first five months of 2026, an average of no more than 191 trucks a day – still far below the territory’s daily pre-war needs.

In an earlier publication, the chamber of commerce documented the emergence of lighter-repair work during the war, saying lighters were among items prevented from entering Gaza.

That is why lighters are now so valuable and families spend relatively large amounts to fix them rather than buy a new one.

Sharing a single lighter

For Shadi Abu Shamlah, a displaced father living with his family at Al-Karmel School west of Gaza City, the shortage means sharing a lighter among tents.

“The whole school here… you wouldn’t find more than four lighters,” he said.

The few available lighters move from one tent to another as families try to cook, heat water or prepare hot drinks.

“The lighter today is the backbone of life. If you have a lighter in your tent, you’re okay. If you don’t have one, you’re stuck,” he said.

“The simplest things need fire. You want a cup of tea, you want to cook, you want to make milk for a child… you need fire.”

Abu Shamlah says his family sometimes goes to bed without dinner because they cannot light a fire.

Repairing lighters has also become difficult. He says a lighter flint can cost 25 to 30 shekels ($8–$10), while people have resorted to using gas from larger cylinders to refill lighters, sometimes causing burns.

Tamer Al-Shawish, who worked as a driver before the war, turned to fixing lighters to help provide for his family.

On a small stall near Al Karmel school camp, the 24-year-old father of two says his new profession was previously unheard of.

“The war has forced us into jobs and work we never knew before. I started repairing lighters so I could provide for my family’s needs,” he told Al Jazeera.

A new profession

“Before the war, no one needed to repair a lighter. They were cheap and available. When the gas ran out, we would throw it away and buy another one.”

“People come to repair the lighter because it is cheaper than buying a new one, especially with the high prices and shortages of basic goods,” Tamer said.

He salvages parts from damaged lighters to repair others.

“Even an old lighter has value now. We take parts from damaged lighters and use them to repair other lighters, so they last longer.”