Chicory, Apple and Stilton Salad

January. The garden is bare and the salad drawer in the fridge is a reproach. Lettuce at this time of year tastes of water and good intentions. But chicory doesn't care about the cold. It arrives at the market in tight, pale heads, crisp as anything, with a clean bitterness that wakes you up the way summer leaves never need to.

This is the salad I come back to when the days are short and the evenings call for something that isn't another braise. Bitter chicory, sharp apple, the salty crumble of Stilton, and walnuts toasted until the kitchen smells like warmth itself. A cider vinaigrette pulls it all together, the vinegar's sharpness cutting through the cheese, the honey softening the edges just enough. It takes fifteen minutes. It feeds four. It looks like you tried harder than you did.

I make it through the winter months and into early spring, when the chicory is firm and good and there's still a wedge of Stilton in the fridge from Christmas. At our table it sits alongside cold meats or a bowl of soup, or sometimes it is the whole meal, with bread and butter and nothing else needed. I wrote it down in the notebook last December: chicory, apple, Stilton, walnuts. Cold night. Candles. Right food, right evening.