Natalie Portman
Best known for her Oscar-award-winning performance in Black Swan and her passionate activism for the #MeToo movement (she wore a cape embroidered with names of overlooked female filmmakers at this year’s academy awards), Natalie Portman has turned to cooking in isolation. Threaded between Instagram posts about Time’s Up, civil rights and award shows are vegan cooking videos from her wood-panelled kitchen featuring everything from s’mores pancakes to the perfect roasted cauliflower. She’s a huge animal advocate and has been vegan for almost a decade, cutting out dairy and eggs after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. At the home she shares with husband Benjamin Millepied, she’s started growing vegetables in her garden and tries to cook as seasonally as possible with the produce she grows.
Gigi Hadid
Supermodel and mum-to-be Gigi Hadid has mastered quarantine cooking at her parent’s farm in Pennsylvania, where she is staying with her sister Bella and British boyfriend Zayn Malik. She’s been cooking up a storm with hearty comfort foods that have included mac and cheese, penne alla vodka, a guac-heavy burrito bowl and, most recently, homemade za’atar focaccia inspired by her Palestinian heritage. “A quarantine goal of mine was to start making bread,” she writes in the caption.
Linda Ring
Swedish photographer and stylist Linda Ring turns sourdough bread into works of art inspired by the artists she loves. Recreating pictures by Picasso, Matisse, Helene Schjerfbeck, and Carl and Karin Larsson, they are not only inspiration for food fiends but art lovers as well. She lives in a flower-filled home on the island of Stora Essingen in Stockholm with her sommelier husband Mattias and their 12-year old son Reuben, who started playing around with bread one day and crafted something she thought was beautiful. Her recipe is simple: just water, flour and salt, plus a sourdough starter that needs to be fed for five to six hours before baking.
Zoey Gong
Founder of New York Chinatown’s Table 81, Zoey Gong is the millennial Shanghainese chef bringing traditional Chinese medicine to a global audience. Her Instagram account is filled with plant-based recipes, mostly centred around Chinese medicinal cuisine, using her background in clinical nutrition to create simple recipes that are easy to make at home. She cooks up black garlic gnocchi, a simple salad made from celery, hemp oil, hemp seeds, aged rice vinegar, and wood ear mushrooms, and delicious vegetable dumplings. Then provides nutritional information and the health benefits of the ingredients she uses — the black garlic, for example, is full of antioxidants, good for balancing blood sugar and cholesterol levels, and boosting immunity.
Laura Jackson
During the UK’s coronavirus lockdown period, British broadcaster and founder of the pop-up dinner club series Hoste, Laura Jackson started the hashtag #makeamealofit. With it she encouraged her followers to decorate their tables and take pride in their cooking, believing that by glamming-up your dinner setting, a simple pasta creation can be transformed into something of an occasion. Themed evenings included a Mexican night complete with easy-to-recreate margaritas and homemade tacos, and a UK-favourite beer-battered fish with chips, tarragon tartar sauce and minted peas, wrapped in newspaper.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow is no newcomer to the kitchen. She’s published four cookbooks about healthy eating since her first in 2011 and has been sharing recipes on her website Goop for over a decade. With that, Gwyneth Paltrow has become synonymous with aspirational wellness and lifestyle. On her Instagram, you’ll find recipes and videos for protein- and fiber-rich smoothies, vegetarian paella and chopped salads.
Florence Pugh
English actress Florence Pugh is using food and music to get through quarantine. The Little Woman star has been doing her part to curb isolation anxiety in the kitchen, cooking everything from ratatouille to butternut squash soup, which she says is “really easy, really therapeutic. Give some stirring a go if you’re feeling anxious. It’s certainly helped me.” In her Instagram stories, she cooks, dances to indie music and sips a from a large glass of white wine.
Editor
Emma RussellCredit
(Lead image by Arthur Elgort/Conde Nast from Getty Images)