This is a trip to Chengdu with a difference as I’m here to help out after the arrival of our granddaughter, Isla, a fortnight ago. Having not met her big brother till his first birthday, because of Covid restrictions, it’s been such a privilege to be here from the time she arrived home from hospital. It’s a cliche to say you forget how small babies are, but I’d also forgotten just how quickly they change. Already, she has gone from being a tiny scrap of a thing, furious at being removed from the comfort of her mother’s womb, to spending time every day with her big blue eyes wide open, taking in the world around her.

In China, there is the very civilised expectation that mothers will have help for the first 30 days after a baby’s birth as well, in Sichuan, as fathers getting 30 days paternity leave. I volunteered gleefully for the job of mother’s help, knowing that a big part of my job would be giving Casper lots of attention, so he didn’t feel ousted. The first few days and nights were full-on baby handling, as Kate came home from hospital only 48 hours after a C-section.  Now, however, Kate is strong enough to do much more and Isla is more relaxed having her nappy changed so things have got easier for me, at least, though sharing a bed with a wriggly three year old has its moments!

I’m enjoying doing Casper’s kindergarten runs, morning and afternoon, along back streets near Ed and Kate’s apartment lined with food shops and pavement vegetable sellers, despite the stress of being in charge of a small tornado on a bike, who spends more time looking around him than at where he is going! It’s a chance to browse and select some novel looking things to try cooking – there is a much larger selection of fresh seasonal, leafy vegetables here than we get at home, many of them brassica shoots, at this time of year. Finding small pockets of vegetables growing in every spare corner of the city still comes as a surprise – there is a very healthy looking patch at the side of the kindergarten which might well supply some of the pavement market.

Normally our trips to China involve lots of eating out but, with Kate effectively grounded (she’s not supposed to leave the house for 30 days), we’re enjoying lots more Sichuan home cooking this time. I was a bit concerned about making sure Kate got the food she wanted to eat, especially as I knew there were restrictions on what she is supposed to have, but I needn’t have worried. This is China, and you can hire an ‘aunty’ for a couple of hours to cook whatever you want, having had the fresh ingredients delivered an hour or so after ordering them!

Fish wort, served as a cold salad in the photo above, is probably the most unusual thing I’ve tasted so far – some say its smells resembles rotten fish! The smell comes from its complement of volatile oils, flavonoids and alkaloids and, in particular, the active ingredient decanoyl acetaldehyde. Kate remembers Fish wort growing more or less as a weed around her grandmother’s house, when she was a child, but now it is cultivated as a vegetable and valued for its high Vitamin C content and putative anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, antibacterial and antiviral effects. It has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and there does seem to be some evidence for its efficacy (Wei et al, 2024) – having ‘wort’ as part of its common name reflects this.

Kate also has pre-prepared ‘confinement meals’ – sachets of different mixtures of grains for each day, which just need water adding and are then cooked overnight in the rice cooker. To be honest, she was pretty bored of bland food after a week and, as her mum won’t be reading this, it’s safe to say that a little more of the usual flavour and spice is creeping back into our meals!

Sometimes, Ed and I are trusted to cook – Ed’s chicken soup got the thumbs up and the smoked tofu we’ve served with bean sprouts, pork mince and garlic chives, on different occasions, has been pretty good. The purple mustard leaf, another Brassica, whose name Ed and Kate are still discussing, was less successful. Apparently we should have blanched the shoots to remove the bitterness and maybe stirred through some sesame oil.  We live and learn!

It’s nice to have the chance to experiment and to have a refresher on the basics of Sichuan cooking; get everything chopped in advance, use more oil than you might think in a very hot pan, start with thinly sliced ginger and garlic and maybe some chilli bean paste and keep everything moving the whole time it’s cooking – it only takes a couple of minutes. Stir through some cooking wine, soy sauce and vinegar when the dish starts to look dry and serve. Dishes are prepared in quick succession, with those which take longest to cool down served first – no messing around reheating things in a microwave, as we tend to do.

As Christmas approaches, we’re planning some different cooking – a small table-top oven is never going to roast a turkey so we’re going for a nut roast, with pigs in blankets for the meat eaters.  Most of what we need can be sourced fairly easily in Chengdu but we’re working on a substitute for sprouts, which seem to be the one Brassica you can’t buy here.  That may be a good thing as, when I had Rosie just before Christmas, they were the only thing the midwife told me to avoid eating while breastfeeding!

P. Wei et al. (2024) Houttuynia Cordata Thunb.: A comprehensive review of traditional applications, phytochemistry, pharmacology and safety Phytomedicine,123, 155195