Just spent a lovely morning wandering around Birkenhead. I really like Birkenhead, there are loads of little independent food shops, including a few brilliant green grocers, all different types of specialist international food stores and also loads of charity shops you can have a good rummage around in. As ‘research’ for my new directory section I’ve just spent the last few hours wandering around these shops, mostly on Oxton Road and Grange Road West, I’ve bought all my vegetables for the week and also had a good chat to some of the friendly people who ran the shops.

I found a great little Asian (mostly Thai) food shop, called  Siam Asian Food, where you can get all kinds of vegetables, huge sacks of different rices, noodles, coconut milk, fresh ginger and the like. Next door is a Polish Shop selling lots of stuff I didn’t recognise as well as the usual pickles and things. There’s a health food shop, which also sells home brewing kits and does all kind of aromatherapy, massage reiki and other interesting things. My favorite place I went today was probably K and N, a fruit and vegetable shop, it’s huge, sells all sorts and the people that work there are lovely. The guy today threw me in some coriander which I’d forgotten to pick up with the rest of the things I bought, how nice? That would never happen at Tesco. There are lots more great looking places, but with my arms aching from several bags of chuncky vegetables it was time to head home. No doubt I’ll be back down to check out some of the other places.

Also in the last few days I’ve been on the mushroom hunt again, this time to Eastham Woods Country Park on the Wirral. Still no edible finds, but we did see a couple of things of note, this rather disgusting looking, and even more disgusting smelling stink horn and lots of some kind of puffball which all had another parasytic mushroom growing out of it. Very odd. So no edible mushrooms, but there is a lot of wood sorrel and several sweet chestnut trees. Wil probably go back in a couple of weeks and see if anythign has appeared. It’s actually quite interesting not finding anything as it, hopefully, should give us some idea of what the conditions need to be like when eventually the do start popping up.

Stinkhorn

strange puffball