Last week when I went to do my shopping at K+N in Birkenhead (top veg shop!) I saw they had a couple of crates of English tomatoes for sale at £2.99 each. £2.99!! The box was over 5kg! So that's less than 60p per kg or about £1 less per kg than normal price. I knew it was good, but I'd never normally get through so many before they went squidgy.  And then a flash of inspiration, I remembered seeing Hugh making tomato sauce for the year from his home grown yearly glut and decided this was my chance to do the same (shame they weren't home grown though). This is really good. K+N probably buy from wholesale market in Liverpool, which I assume works a bit like a normal market, only bigger. Often at the end of the day you'll get people practically giving things away, and they pass this on to their customers. Reminds me of I was walking through Kirkgate Market in Leeds a couple of weeks ago and a guy was shouting "Bag of bananas a pound! As many bananas as you can fit in a carrier bag a pound!" He had a hoard of ladies surrounding ...

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 ...