My winter request: drop me into a bath of molten cheese and leave me be till spring

Unfashionable opinion klaxon: I quite like the chilly mornings and dark afternoons of winter, which make it acceptable to hibernate on the sofa with a mug of tea and a good book. It’s the kind of weather that encourages consumption – because little is more dispiriting to the serious glutton than being too hot to eat – and near the top of my seasonal hit list is cheese. Much as I love a feta-laden Greek salad in summer, it’s now that piquant blues and nutty kings of the mountain really come into their own. Drop me into a bath of molten cheese and leave me be till spring, please.

Though it’s a bit early for serious snow, even in the Alps, that’s no reason not to get in the mood with some classics from a region that takes cheese seriously – Nigel Slater has some lovely thoughts on Swiss fondue, I’m borderline obsessed with Savoyarde tartiflette, and Angela Hartnett offers up chard with polenta and blue cheese from across the Italian border … though I suspect any dark, leafy greens can be subbed in for the rainbow-stemmed variety if, like me, you’re not a fan.

If you’re after a weekend project, whether to entertain kids or yourself, then Claire Thomson can teach you to make your own halloumi and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall a sort-of ricotta, while Tom Hunt has a pleasingly thrifty way with old cheese rinds. That said, like him I tend to eat them, either with the cheese itself, or repurposed in recipes like Dan Lepard’s baked cheese dumplings. (On the subject of dumplings, I hope Anna Key’s curd-cheese-stuffed pierogi delight her daughter as much today as they did on her fifth birthday party a decade ago.)

The gleefully salty, fatty qualities of cheese make it excellent comfort food, whether that’s Toni Tipton-Martin’s soul food macaroni cheese or Feast’s own Ravinder Bhogal’s lime pickle chilli cheese toastie, but it can do fancy too. Who wouldn’t be happy to sit down toan elegant bowl of Kaushy Patel’s sabzi and paneer makni?

If you feel like something lighter in a season where sometimes even I yearn for crispness of the non deep-fried variety, Harry Eastwood shares a refreshingly bittersweet salad of endive, walnut and apple with a Roquefort dressing from her book The Skinny French Kitchen.

And, of course, cheese has its place at the other end of the meal too, in Yotam Ottolenghi’s cheese crepes with honey, orange and pistachios and Meera Sodha’s vegan vanilla cheesecake. In short, cheese is not just for Christmas. Though I must remember to order mine.

Drooling over | Grateful as I am to have an entire internet of recipes at my fingertips, it can never hope to compete with the beauty of print, and this week I’ve been enjoying the quiet loveliness of the photographs, recipes and stories in Cherie Denham and Andrew Montgomery’s newly published book The Irish Bakery. Warm treacle scones incoming.

The best thing I ate this week | Not coincidentally, the deliciously greasy, cheese-stuffed roti at Hawker’s Kitchen just around the corner from London’s Kings Cross station hit the spot on an unexpectedly chilly Saturday afternoon – and next time I’m not sharing.

Unexpected item in bagging area | I bought some long pepper to make Regula Ysewijn’s speculaas spice mix – a close relative of the more familiar black pepper, but with long clusters of peppercorns patterned rather like the cup of an acorn, it originates in northern India, and was the pepper of choice in ancient Rome. It has a deeper, more mellow heat and a flavour I can only describe as hauntingly medieval. In a good way.

What I listened to | As someone who feels uncomfortable with the casual way we now consume chicken as a snack, rather than the occasional treat that it was in postwar Britain, Chris van Tulleken’s new Radio 4 series Planet Chicken was preaching to the converted. Many of us should be buying better and less if we truly care about welfare.