An austere plate for two. Take two big bulbs of fennel, it doesn't matter that they might look scrawny and battered so long as they are fresh. Autumn is the best time for fennel, a vegetable with cold blood in its veins. 

Slice them thinly, and then on a declining heat, fry them for more than half an hour in strong, peppery Greek or Palestinian olive oil. Ledbury's wonderful Handley Organics will sell it to you at a bargain price.  The fennel will soften and eventually disintegrate into the oil, helped by the addition of flaked salt. 
 
The garlic is sliced wafer thin. You saw Ray Liotta in Goodfellas slicing garlic in prison with a razor blade; well that’s how thin.  To the fennel, you add the garlic at about 30 minutes and give it all another 15 minutes.
 
Pinenuts are roasted until just golden in a heavy pan; and parmesan cheese is shaved.
 
Meanwhile, a large pan of salted water comes to a lively boil and the pasta is cooked for the desired time. The Italians love it almost raw: they call it al dente.
 
Here’s the important part. Drain the pasta but not till it’s dry – keep back some tablespoons of the cooking liquid. Add the pasta to the fennel and mix it very well, coating every strand and mixing the oily slush evenly.  Sprinkle pinenuts and cheese. If you have fresh herbs, go ahead: basil, fennel tops, dill, even a touch of tarragon. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.

Note: you should always have fresh herbs. Buy or pluck when abundant, and when perfectly dry freeze them on a tray before putting in a bag for winter. Better than dried by far. 
 

​My last Sunday is a dirty day in Chongqing, the fastest growing city in China, perhaps the world.  The marble-tiled pavements are slicked with grey rainwater, as slippery as black ice.  Subdued shoppers jostle umbrellas in the street bottlenecks while pop music blares from cavernous mobile phone shops, white-lit and alive with wide-eyed young people.  In the broad piazzas of ShaPingBa – one of this city’s glitzy ‘down-town’ centres -  the romance of outdoor ballroom dancers and the cheer of laughing families is missing. 
 
Today through the mud spattered pedestrianised streets, impatient cars hassle the crowds with jammed-on horns and nudge their bumpers up against people’s backsides.
 
The Chinese love of harmony is at odds with the ferocity of its drivers. Through a quiet, tree-lined street, we scream past a Maternity Hospital scattering pregnant women and parents carrying new-born infants.  On the elevated motorway which skirts the wide Yangtse River, a small, ox-strong man with a bamboo pole and two laden baskets of vegetables lurches across three oblivious lanes of lightning traffic, swinging his yoke this way and that to avoid being flattened.
 
As I walk across the square I am taken aback by a man singing sweetly, plaintively into a red microphone. He is hauling a trolley behind him on which there is a big speaker, wrapped in old polythene. How delightful and incongruous I think. Then I see his pitiful family: a wife who has no legs seated on a primitive wooden trolley, pushing herself along with two short sticks. Tethered to the trolley wheel-chair by a rope is a boy aged perhaps five or six. 
 
Each morning, I am enchanted by the calm poetry of red-dressed men and women with glinting swords and taut limbs, practising t’ai chi to the music of strange birdsong. Their balletic movements are fluid, controlled, precise. In China life is all about the flowing of energy; like water coursing around a rock in a stream, it finds a way through.
 
It’s nearly time to leave. I have a date at the Chinese Opera (with no great hopes, I have to admit). But the show is intoxicating: words are declaimed in short, staccato phrases accompanied by an off-stage percussionist beating out the rhythms of the verse with a wood-xylophone.  I best enjoy a solo piece,  the story of a man exiled years before and now living alone, far away, in the mountains.  He explains his crime and punishment, and weeping, heart-broken, he tells of the pain of eternal separation from his family.  Suddenly there is a prowling tiger, so he runs to the top of the mountain (a table covered in a blue silk drape) and stays still until the danger passes. Returning to his humble home he realises that he must not spend his life in a state of regret and loneliness and anxiety, but must go forward and make a new life for himself.  And there it ends optimistically.
 
That’s how it is here. Chongqing offers terse glimpses of both Heaven and Hell.
[From 2010]

​Pears are the most mischievous fruit. Blink and they’ve gone over. One minute they’re unbearably hard, bland as chewed paper, the next they’re sopping ripe, not at all good to eat. And yet… a perfectly ripe pear, sweet, juicy and perfumed, is a beautiful thing, one of autumn’s treasures.
 
This year (2015), the pear blossom was caught by a rogue frost, but not all of it. Some trees are barren, while others are groaning under their own bounty. Yet others couldn't decide: one side is bare, the other abundant, such is the fickle April weather and our half and half climate in Ledbury, cusped between the chilly uplands of Malvern, and the sea-bathed air of the Severn vale.
 
The fine September weather has brought the fruit to a point of perfection, every bit of it, all at once. The problem is finding a way to capture the moment.  Cooked pears in pies, tarts and crumbles are just satisfactory in my opinion but tend to blandness: the apple is superior as a cooking fruit. Wine poached pears however are good, and they can be prepared in quantity, bagged and frozen. Take wine (red or white, nothing posh), aromatic spices, a vanilla pod and some sugar and honey to make a sweet poaching broth, and commence simmering the peeled whole fruit. Each batch will take about 20 minutes to cook. Serve with anything creamy, as you would a tinned pear, or use in a trifle. 
 
A variation on this is the wonderful pickled pear, sweet-sour and spiced , sure to bring alive a cold winter platter of meat, pork pie and cheese.
 
Pickled Pears 
 
2 kg small hard pears: about twenty fruit (pick before fully ripe)
½ ltr local cider (or better, perry) vinegar
350 gm soft brown sugar
Stick of cinnamon, a tbsp allspice berries, 6 cloves, a tsp black peppercorns
A sliced lemon, pips removed
 
Peel the pears with a good potato peeler and put into cold water.
Prepare the syrup by dissolving the sugar in the vinegar and adding the other ingredients.
Add the pears and poach until just tender – between 15 and 20 minutes. Top up with a little water to cover the pears if need be.
Remove to sterilized jars (eg kilner).
Boil the liquid fiercely for about 5 minutes until thickened and concentrated. Pour into the jars covering completely the pears. If you've reduced your liquid too much and don't have enough, you could add some neat cider vinegar. Close the lids and leave to mature for a month. Keep in the fridge, once opened.