Influencers’ inventive recipes for high-protein dairy product have boosted trade by 40% for one producer

If you peered into a UK fridge in the late 1970s, it is more than likely you would have found a pot of cottage cheese tucked between the prawn cocktail and sherry trifle.

A popular “diet food” at the time, demand waned in subsequent decades as the high-protein, low-fat wonder food fell out of fashion. But 50 years on from its heyday, cottage cheese is making a comeback in the UK, and has become an unlikely hit with health-conscious Gen Z.

Driven by a wave of social media influencers sharing inventive recipes for the dairy product, which is made from milk curds, UK retailers are reporting significant increases in sales, while producers are struggling to keep up with demand.

“It’s come from absolutely nowhere,” said Robert Graham, managing director of Graham’s Family Dairy. “Since May of last year, when there was a TikTok craze that went on, cottage cheese sales for us are up 40%.”

The company said the growth in production, the equivalent of an extra 2m kilograms a year, means it is looking at ways to increase output, including an initial growth plan to invest £5m to bolster its production facilities.

“We are considering new factories because cottage cheese production is almost full,” said Graham, whose company supplies big retailers such as Co-op, Morrisons and Aldi.

Dairy company Arla is also benefiting from the cottage cheese rush, reporting a double-digit increase in sales in the last three months, while Marks & Spencer experienced a 30% increase compared with last year, and Waitrose reported a 22% year-on-year rise.

A Jamaican-style grown-up’s milkshake featuring Guinness, Nurishment and white rum

If there’s one thing Jamaican people do well, it’s make punch, and this one is sweet, creamy, addictive and easy. It takes me down memory lane – I remember begging my nana to let me have some and always being told no, because of the alcohol. Eventually, though, I got to an age when I was allowed a tiny glass with Sunday dinner. It’s like a Jamaican adult milkshake, but better.

This is an edited extract from Flayvaful: Spice up your Kitchen, by Nathaniel Smith, published by Murdoch Books at £22. To order a copy for £19.36, go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

A big slab of lush, chocolate heaven with a velvety crumb and mascarpone icing, and just made for sharing and showing off

I almost never say no to chocolate cake. I’m a sucker for them all, from super-fudgy, flourless ones to intensely dark torte s. But this is the chocolate cake I’ll make for a crowd. It’s an easy, one-bowl bake with a velvety crumb and a milk chocolate mascarpone frosting that brings a luscious, creamy texture. Casual yet decadent.

Discover this recipe and many more from your favourite cooks in the new Guardian Feast app , with smart features to make everyday cooking easier and more fun

Value for money is harder to find these days, but here are a few pointers

While we all hunker down in the winter, these warmer days and lighter nights are an invitation to be more sociable, and to just drop in on family and friends, outstay our welcome and drink all their wine. Which used to be OK(ish) when a decent bottle of wine cost between £5 and £10, but is less acceptable now when, unless it’s on special offer, it will more often than not set you back more than £10.

Nowadays, I’m constantly doing double takes when I check the price of a wine I’ve tried within recent memory and find that the price has increased by at least 25%. Tesco’s own-label red vermouth , for example, was £5.75 just over 18 months ago, and now it’s £8 – which is still reasonable, but it’s hard to see why it’s shot up so much.

For more by Fiona Beckett, go to fionabeckett.substack.com

If the Italians sitting near me looked confused at their pricey plates of sepia stodge, I can’t blame them

I am just a lone woman, eating a pickled egg and asking Poppies to love her. Yet, from my table in the new Portobello Road branch, the love is not reciprocated. Solo dining is one of my specialist subjects, and my advice for lone wolves hoping for a walk-in anywhere is to turn up slightly earlier than the rush, when the staff are likely to be less fractious and dismissive of you turning up to clutter a table.

Poppies starts serving its famous fish and chips from 11am, so I arrived 10 minutes before noon. Once inside, and as usual when I’m on my tod, I scan the room so I’m able to dispute whichever dismal crevice the server might try to stuff me in. By the toilet door? Next to the Epos machine? In this all-new Poppies, the worst seats out of the 64 available are those next to the open front door, where the queue is sorted into takeaway and eat-in diners. Armed with the knowledge that I’m intending to spend about £30 on regular fish with chips and a slice of apple pie, I fight the server’s urge to seat me there. “How about there or there?” I ask, pointing a hand towards a couple of nicer spots, but he seems to have suddenly become acutely myopic.

Cucurbits such as courgettes, cucumbers and squash produce fruits all season long – including one that makes a perfect summer drink garnish

I absolutely love cucurbits. They belong to the gourds, a plant family that has been cultivated for millennia and includes courgettes, cucumbers and winter squash – all crops I grow every season. Cucurbits show remarkable vigour, with their hairy palmate leaves and curling tendrils. And with any luck they will produce a bounty of fruit throughout the summer.

Most species hail from warmer climates, so when grown in the UK are cultivated as annuals. However, beyond the more familiar vegetables mentioned above, a wealth of more unusual (for the UK) cucurbits can be sown now.

I’ve tried peanut butter and bacon pizza, and had a caviar one, too

There is nothing I like more in this world than pizza. I grew up in the early 90s in Connecticut, where my dad owned a pizzeria called Kenny V’s until I was three. I still have his old restaurant sign in my garage.

For the last six years, I’ve eaten pizza every single day. Sometimes it might just be a slice, but most days I will get through a whole one. My favourite is a classic American deep-pan pepperoni. I also love tomato and cheese on a nice thick crust, so a plain margherita will never go amiss.

The history of how the all-American breakfast snack was created is served up with lashings of goofiness in this comedy caper

Standup veteran Jerry Seinfeld makes his directing debut with this decent family comedy that puts a surreal twist on the history of Pop-Tarts, one of the US’s most beloved snacks: the sheer goofiness and disposable pointlessness are entertaining.

Seinfeld created the film with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, the same writing team that worked on Bee Movie , the animation that Seinfeld starred in, produced and co-wrote in 2007. Unfrosted doesn’t quite have the flair of Bee Movie, but there’s a steady stream of excellent gags, creating a rising crescendo of silliness similar in effect to Seinfeld’s own distinctive falsetto-hysterical declamation at the moment of ultimate joke-awareness. There are also nice supporting roles and cameos, including an extraordinary dual walk-on from Jon Hamm and John Slattery, recreating their ad exec Mad Men personae Don Draper and Roger Sterling.

LeBron James and JJ Redick’s podcast contains in-depth basketball analysis – and plenty of oenophilia. They’re not the only ones around the league

LeBron James could have chosen anything as a hobby to shepherd him into early middle age. He could have started collecting vintage cars or investing in startups or flying planes; he could have gotten into Texas-style barbecue and joined the massed ranks of American males who index their self-esteem to the quality of their smoke rings; he could have launched an alt-coin; he could have become a Roman Empire guy , a pizza geek, an amateur rancher, or a whisky bore. Instead he has developed a passion for wine. Nowhere is that passion on fuller display than in Mind the Game , James’s new show with JJ Redick, which sees this colossus of the boards dissect – in sometimes bewilderingly wonkish detail – the great plays and tactical trends of modern basketball while pouring a series of fabulously expensive wines for the pair’s on-screen delectation.

James, of course, is the perennial adult of American sport, an athlete who had the body of a man when he was still a boy and arrived in the NBA with all the elements of his mature game – the vision, the piano hands, the speed in transition and bulging power through the paint – seemingly already perfected. So it makes a rough kind of sense that he’s chosen scholarly, contemplative, grown-up oenophilia – the most responsible form of adult irresponsibility, a pastime that educates while it intoxicates – as the signature off-court diversion of his twilight years in the NBA. The king of the court is now the king of the wine influencers.