Mexican transgender rights activists Kenya Cuevas and Andrea Luna sat in front of their longtime friend Paola Buenrostro’s pink grave in Mexico City

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Jeremy Pang doesn’t have a classic chef origin story: he “hated” food as a child. Before he turned 10, the chef, teacher and owner of the School of Wok in London admits: “I hated eating – I honestly did not like food. “Up to the age of, like, nine, it would take my mum two, three hours to get my dinner down me. I just didn’t want to eat – I wanted to go out and play football with my mates. I wanted to go and do stuff and play – I also wanted to eat fish fingers and all the stuff my friends were eating at home.” Pang grew up in a Chinese household and is a third-generation chef. When he was 10 years old, his family moved from the UK to Singapore for two years. Now aged 39 and based in southwest London, Pang says upon making the move, his “life completely changed”. He says: “When you go into hawker centres [open-air food markets] in Singapore, it’s a different world. Every single stall is a specialist in one type of food – not even cuisine. So you might have one uncle who has cooked chicken rice for his whole life, or another person who has cooked Hokkien Mee [a stir-fried noodle dish] for 40 years. “When people are as specialist as that, you cannot not want to eat it. And you see everyone digging into their food with no real etiquette – but the etiquette is the enjoyment of that bowl of food.” From there, Pang says Singapore “opened mine and my sister’s horizons” and he fell in love with food. With Singapore’s proximity to other Southeast Asian countries, he was exposed to a variety of cuisines – from Indonesian to Malaysian – many of which are taught at the School of Wok, along with the Chinese food Pang grew up with. With two kids of his own, aged six and two, Pang says: “I now feel so sorry for my mum.” Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the chef says of his oldest: “It was really difficult to get him to enjoy anything that wasn’t raw carrot or cucumber – which actually is healthy at least, but every day? That’s hard.” The pandemic shifted his son’s eating habits. Pang took a couple of months off and “cooked with him – we started making homemade pizzas, flapjacks – anything he wanted to make. He definitely at that point thought he had more of a Western palate, but I’ve known since he was really young and started eating that he does love Chinese food. “He likes the slightly lighter palate, and home-cooked Chinese food can be quite light – steamed fish, flash-fried vegetables, things like that.” One constant from Pang’s childhood to his family life now is the concept of feasting – serving multiple dishes for one meal. “This is how Asian cuisine is eaten, and should be eaten,” he says simply. “My style of cooking is 100 per cent home cooking anyway, and I’ve grown up with it. If you are Asian, that’s just a way of life. But if you’re not, it’s hard to compute how to get four or five dishes on the table, all hot or in the right state at the right time.” He continues: “Even if when we’re doing midweek meals at home, if I’m cooking Chinese or Southeast Asian just for the four of us, I’ll quite often cook two or three dishes. Those two or three dishes are there to be shared – that absolutely is our way of cooking and eating.” Pang’s latest book, Simple Family Feasts, is all about demystifying this concept for home cooks who haven’t grown up with it. Each chapter is dedicated to a different cuisine – including Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean and Indonesian – and shows you how to build a feast, guiding you through which dishes to make and in what order. Balance is crucial to pulling off a feast. “If, for example, you just ate crispy, deep-fried stuff – which is terribly bad for you, but we all love it – yes, you want to eat lots of it at the beginning. But five minutes later, you might get lost in that deep fried, crispy, greasy world, and so you’re likely to stop eating it at some point quite quickly. “But if you had something crispy, you have something opposite that melts in the mouth, you had something soft with a gentle bite, you had crunchy – usually from fresh vegetables or flash-fried vegetables, salads, anything like that – and you had a perfect balance of those textures. Honestly, I think you could just keep eating.” Growing up with this style of cooking must make Pang a brilliant multitasker – something he says is “a great skill to have”, but “sometimes it’s my worst enemy”. “I’m constantly multitasking – I get to the end of the day and I don’t know what’s happened, I sometimes can’t tell you what I’ve done in a day. I might have done a million different things… So in some ways, I’m very good at multitasking – but when I get home, my wife probably wouldn’t agree with that.” Like all of Pang’s cookbooks, this is an “ode to my father”, who passed away in 2009. “He’s the one who instilled that love of cooking and cuisine – especially Asian food. He never really taught me how to cook, he just said, ‘Stand and watch’, or, ‘Taste this and tell me what’s in it’. That was his style of teaching.” ‘Jeremy Pang’s School Of Wok: Simple Family Feasts’ (published by Hamlyn; £22). Read More Marina O’Loughlin is wrong – there’s joy in solo dining Budget Bites: Three recipes to keep food bills down before pay day Meal plan: Romesco chicken and other recipes to fall in love with Who knew a simple flan could be so well-travelled? Midweek comfort food: Singaporean curry sauce and rice How to make Thai favourite lemongrass chicken stir-fry

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A Moscow court has shot down an appeal by Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich challenging a decision to extend his pre-trial detention. Gershkovich, 31, was arrested almost six months ago in Russia on spying charges. Russian officials accused him of collecting state secrets about the military. He – along with the Wall Street Journal and the US government – denies these allegations. The decision to extend his pre-trial detention had been made in August. Last week, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield and Gershkovich’s family called for his immediate release from Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. The Moscow city court on Tuesday upheld its initial ruling. A judge in Lefortovo Court in Moscow extended the journalist’s pre-trial detention until 30 November. The hearing was held behind closed doors. The WSJ journalist will remain in jail until then, reported Russia’s Tass news agency. “The Moscow City Court considered the lawyers’ complaint in a closed court session and decided to remove the material regarding E Gershkovich from appeal consideration, and send the material to the Lefortovo District Court of Moscow to eliminate the circumstances impeding the consideration of the criminal case in the appellate court,” the court said in a statement. It remains unclear why the court refused to consider Gershkovich’s appeal. The case is expected to be returned to a lower court. The 31-year-old American citizen had been granted accreditation by Russia’s foreign ministry to work there as a journalist. He was arrested by agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, during a reporting assignment in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on 29 March this year. This is the first instance of a Western journalist being arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the end of the Cold War. If Gershkovich gets convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison. According to Russian law, people found guilty of espionage can potentially receive a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. US envoy to Russia Lynne Tracy, who was present in the courtroom on Tuesday, told the media: “The US position remains unwavering. The charges against Evan are baseless. The Russian government locked Evan up for simply doing his job. Journalism is not a crime.” “Evan is fully aware of the gravity of his situation, yet he remains remarkably strong,” she said. To mark Gershkovich’s 100 days in jail since July this year, the White House press secretary said: “The world knows that the charges against Evan are baseless – he was arrested in Russia during the course of simply doing his job as a journalist, and he is being held by Russia for leverage because he is an American.” After visiting the journalist in prison, Ms Thomas-Greenfield said: “No family should have to watch their loved one being used as a political pawn. And that’s exactly what President [Vladimir] Putin is doing. Russia’s actions are beyond cruel, and they are a violation of international law.” US president Joe Biden said in July that he was “serious on a prisoner exchange”. “And I’m serious about doing all we can to free Americans being illegally held in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter, and that process is underway,” he said. “President [Joe] Biden spoke to us and gave us a promise to do whatever it takes” to bring Gershkovich home, his parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, said in a July interview with ABC News. “He told us he understands our pain,” said Ms Milman, the mother of the WSJ journalist. In a letter earlier this month to the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, lawyers for the WSJ’s publisher accused Mr Putin of using Gershkovich as a pawn and of “holding him hostage.” The lawyers argue that Mr Putin wants to use Gershkovich “to gain leverage over – and extract a ransom from – the United States, just as he has done with other American citizens whom he has wrongfully detained”. The letter said Gershkovich’s ongoing detention “is a flagrant violation of many of his fundamental human rights”. In June this year, nearly three dozen US senators wrote a letter to Gershkovich expressing their “profound anger and concern” over his detention in the Russian prison. The letter said a “free press is crucial to the foundation and support of human rights everywhere” and that every day he spends in a Russian prison “is a day too long”. “We applaud you for your efforts to report the truth about Russia’s reprehensible invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has resulted in untellable atrocities, tragedies, and loss of life,” the letter read. It said the senators “understand the enormous burden you may feel as the Russian government uses you as a political tool”. Read More U.S. ambassador to Russia visits jailed WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich Father of imprisoned reporter Evan Gershkovich calls on world leaders to urge Russia to free him A new Iran deal shows the Biden administration is willing to pay a big price to free Americans The Body in the Woods | An Independent TV Original Documentary The harrowing discovery at centre of The Independent’s new documentary

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