Talking of pears, as I was recently, if you have a pear tree in your garden, or on your plot, this is the time to be harvesting. In the garden we have an ancient Conference pear which gives us a rain of small, hard, inedible fruit, good for nothing at all. We should cut it down but cutting down a tree feels like murder and anyway, there’s a woodpecker that visits it in summer. Fortunately, our allotment neighbour has a younger and more vigorous Conference and is kind enough to let us pick the pears that hang over our side of the fence.

Stewed pears have a horrible ring of the school cafeteria about them, but properly done they are delicious. I use pomegranates with my pears because:

(a) I’m not a locavore so I don’t limit my diet to what’s grown within a certain distance of home

(b) at this time of year the supermarkets often have them at a knock-down price and

(c) pomegranates are delicious and I’m going to try growing my own in the greenhouse so this recipe is just a way of ensuring I can use my eventual (maybe) crop!

If you’re clever with your hands, you can cut the bottom off your pomegranates, scoop out the seeds and membranes, stuff them with newspaper (yesterday’s Argus perhaps?) and leave on a radiator to dry. In a couple of weeks the fruit will be rock-hard and with a bit of glitter or a spray of gold paint make a fantastic Christmas decoration: half a dozen, wired to your evergreen wreath, look totally Nigella at no extra cost because you’d have thrown the skins away anyway.

Set your oven to 170 Celsius. Juice the seeds from two pomegranate and an orange, after you’ve taken two or three scrapes from the orange skin to serve as zest and put the resulting juices in a bowl with a handful of sugar. Add the orange zest, a cinnamon stick (about two inches long) some grated ginger, and a couple of peppercorns. Stir and let the sugar dissolve while you peel, quarter and core the pears. Home-grown pears come in all shapes and sizes but don’t worry – if it’s easier to cut them in eighths rather than quarters to get the core out, they’ll taste just as good.

Spread the pears out in the bottom of a ceramic dish – you want to achieve a single layer – and then pour the juice over. Cook for 30 to 40 minutes, basting with the juice every ten minutes. Then remove the pears and place them in serving bowls. They won’t be the bubble-gum pink of those recipes that tell you to cook pears in red wine with cloves, but they also won’t taste like mouthwash!

Now strain the remaining juice to remove all the ‘bits’ and reduce it in a little pan – you want to stand over it, stirring madly, until it becomes a seethe of bubbles and if you draw a line across the base of the pan with your wooden spoon, it remains for a split second. This bit of the recipe is fun and smells glorious. In fact, I once made a catering-sized pan of these, and after standing over the juice for about twenty minutes, had to run to the bank. The woman in the queue behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, but what shampoo do you use? Your hair smells lovely.” I explained that achieving my particular fragrance required pears, pomegranates and sugar and walked home on air.

So now you have some gently tanned pears and a rich toffee-coloured sauce. Pour the sauce over the pears and leave to cool. Best served, in my view, with vanilla ice-cream and nothing like school dinners!