A Happy New Year to everyone! And I hope that you haven’t gorged yourself on Christmas cheese such that you can’t bear the sight of it…because it’s Cheese, Please! time again. January is a miserable month. Cold and dark and with no prospect of any festivities to bring light and feasting, it’s a hunker-down-and-wait-it-out sort of month (unless you’re like my neighbour who jets off to Nigeria for three months in which case it’s probably quite toasty).
January requires comfort food, the sort of dishes that warm your cockles and leave you with slightly greasy chops. Cultures of the northern hemisphere abound in such dishes, from après-ski fondue and raclette to macaroni cheese or tartiflette. From risotto and arancini to Welsh rarebit and homity pie, there’s a wealth of cheese-carbo-combos to choose from. Or for a more warming dish, there are cheese-stuffed recipes from Asia (paneer anyone?) to Latin America and its quesadillas, tacos and burritos.
If you can cook up something with cheese to be consumed whilst wearing a slanket in front of a fire and watching All Creatures Great and Small on Yesterday, there’s a place for it in this month’s Cheese, Please! Challenge. Again, it’s a cheese free-for-all but I would encourage you to seek out local cheeses; whether it’s a mozzarella, brie, gouda or gruyère, there are lots of interesting equivalents in the British Isles (I can’t speak for my fellow bloggers in North Korea or Brazil, of course). To paraphrase the Slow Food movement, if we don’t use ’em, we’ll lose ’em.
Want to take part in January’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Blog Challenge? Check out the full rules here.
Write a recipe post using the featured cheese/theme of the month and post it on your blog.
A link to these rules and the Cheese, Please! button (code below) should be included in your post.
My Linkytools account is still ‘experiencing technical difficulties’ but if you tweet the link to me @fromhomage or email it to fromagehomage@yahoo.co.uk then I will pick it up and post a link on this page.
<div align="center"><a href="https://fromagehomage.wordpress.com/" title="Fromage Homage"><img src="http://i1284.photobucket.com/albums/a562/fromagehomage/Cheesey2_zps85113bab.jpg" alt="Fromage Homage" style="border:none;" /></a></div>
Happy hunkering!
Entries so far:
Baked Blue Cheese
Individual Mac and Cheese Pot Pies
British Cheese Fondue Night
Pumpkin and Roquefort Risotto
Broccoli, Courgette and Stilton Soup
Sausage and Courgette Carbonara
Comfort Cheese Toastie
Parmesan Butter Tin Biscuits
Spaghetti Carbonara
Cheese Fondue
Cheese and Bacon Muffins
Chicory and Ham Gratin
Peanut, Apple and Cheese Cookies
Emmental Soda Bread
Easy Peasy Meatballs
Lamb and Potato Bake
Cornish Yarg and Cider Fondue
Roast Cauliflower Cheese Soup
Montgomery’s Cheddar Cheese Risotto
Gruyere Popovers
Tortilla Bake
Brie En Croute
Spinach and Cottage Cheese Cannelloni
Polenta Fries with Chilli BBQ Ranch Dressing
Spanish-inspired Mac and Cheese
Vegan Cheesy Chickpea Dip with Coconut Bacon
Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Roule
Not Quite Poutine Meets Vegemite
Pasta with Ricotta, Zucchini and Parmesan
Italian Cheesecake with Ricotta and Mascarpone
Tartiflette with Broccoli
Roasted Garlic One Pot Macaroni Cheese
A Summer Soup for Winter
Fromage Homage 
Definitely haven’t gone off cheese over the last few weeks, despite devouring huge amounts of Stilton and finding that my home-made efforts are distinctly glittery. Great theme for this month, warming comfort food is definitely needed. Will get thinking!
January definitely calls for comfort food – I’ve never really understood the idea of dieting in one of the coldest months of the year… especially when a well-chosen big jersey can hide much of the Christmas excess. Will do my best to find something suitable for your challenge!
I know – I always used to start these crazy diets on January 1st but in the cold your body cries out for food. Eating comfort food every day is probably not the best idea but I think you have to just huddle down and indulge once in a while to pander to the inner caveman/woman in us all 😉
Cheesy comfort food is just what I want to eat in January (and pretty much any other time of year if I’m honest). Just have to think how I can eat it with chocolate.
Yes, it’s not always the easiest of combinations, is it? (And I think I love both equally). I am pondering a forthcoming Cheese, Please! month which will make the combination easier though so watch this space! 🙂
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Oh dear. I tried several times in several different ways to post your button to my blog. When I thought I finally got it right it ends up I just copied and pasted the Cheese, Please! logo. I believe I effectively linked to your blog and the rules of the contest, however…
It looks fine to me. Don’t worry, I’m not a stickler for rules and regs 😉 Thanks so much for sharing.
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I have made these cheese biscuit that can easily be enjoyed with a bowl of soup too. However, here in sunny South Africa we had it as a light Sunday evening meal.
Here’s my entry! Spaghetti Carbonara
http://kickatthepantrydoor.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/spaghetti-carbonara.html
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Your site looks like a lot of fun. Thanks for the like on the Chicken Cordon Bleu. Have you ever heard of Raclette cooking and cooker? It’s great fun.
Welcome! Your Chicken Cordon Bleu looked oozingly good 🙂 I have heard of raclettes; I have yet to try them but wrote about a British cheese last week called Ogleshield that’s very similar and often used in the same way. It’s on my To Do list to eat one soon 😉
Unfortunately, with the Raclette, you need a special cooker to heat the cheese. I’m in the US and it took me a long time to find one.
I am lucky that there’s a market quite close by that sells cooked raclette. I’ve also been invited to a raclette party next month which is exciting! Have you blogged about your raclette cooking. Would love to read.
I haven’t yet. We usually go to a raclette dinner Christmas Eve hosted by Swiss friends. It’s a Swiss tradition.
Yes, I’ve been invited to the party by a Swiss man so hoping for some quality cheese 🙂
Should be cause raclette is a special type of cheese. Pricy but worth it.
Hi! I would like to give you a cheese recipe for January… I submit link by comments or mail? Thanks
lucia
Lovely! You can put a link and badge on your page and it will link through to mine; and you can email me at fromagehomage@yahoo.co.uk Look forward to seeing what you’ve been cooking 🙂
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Thank you for visiting my blog http://artisancheesesbydeb.wordpress.com and inviting me to fromagehomage – what a fun site. I am really just getting started and haven’t figured out linking and Twitter and such things. But I love the community you have assembled and facilitated and hope to become an active participant. I will jump right in with a January cheese adventure. I have the perfect excuse as I am currently staying in our condo in Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival. We have lots of family and friends with us and we always do a great fondue. So I will post and attempt to link when we get that done. We also will treat ourselves to a wonderful evening at the Deer Valley Ski Resort Empire Lodge Fireside Feast. They have one whole fireplace dedicated to a Raclette that is to die for! Happy Cheese Adventures!
Hello – and welcome! Love a fondue and had a couple just before Christmas. Such a nice thing to do with family and friends. I haven’t tried a raclette yet although I recently tried a British version of the cheese. Sounds lovely though. I look forward to hearing all about your cheesy adventures 🙂
I’m wondering if my soupe au pistou would be too much of a stretch? It’s definitely comfort food, but there is only cheese in the pistou
I’m not much of a stickler, to be honest, and happy for people to share anything nice 🙂 Love soupe au pistou – it was one of the first recipes I used to make, as a teenager.
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Here’s another vegan entry for yo this month: http://tastespace.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/vegan-cheesy-chickpea-dip-with-coconut-bacon/
Thank you 🙂 Always interesting to read your recipes 🙂
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Hello! Can I put in a very late entry? After I posted this recipe for an Australian-Italian-travesty of the Canadian poutine, it occurred to me that it’s comfort food and uses lots of cheese (not an exotic cheese, but it was sold as ‘Australian’ cheddar for Australia day): http://wp.me/p26KJv-sd
Sounds interesting…I’m off to take a look…
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