Today Dan and I took a morning train down the line to Barnes Bridge, for a morning of shopping and strolling.

We went to Two Peas in a Pod greengrocer’s at the far end of the high street, opposite Barnes Green. The fruit and vegetables are not cheap but they are of excellent quality and it’s self service with brown paper bags provided.

We chose some broad beans, two huge sticks of beautiful deep pink rhubarb, ripe plum tomatoes, salad tomatoes, a purple lettuce, some plums (to make compote to go with Greek natural yoghurt at breakfast time), and a few other bits. It came to just over £23 which I though was very fair, given the high quality of produce. No more expensive than ordering a large organic vegetable box from Riverford Organic.

The service inside the shop was polite and efficient, and I was particularly impressed by this as there were a lot of customers being served in its small space and nobody had to wait long.

This shop also incorporates a large deli section and I noticed there was an excellent range of dried spelt pasta, two or three types of polenta and some Stoates’ organic bread flour.  I was hoping they might have some of the Stoates’ award-winning Maltstar flour, but there were only two types – strong organic white bread flour and organic plain flour, ground the traditional way between French burr millstones. I bought a bag of the bread flour to make Dan’s loaves for work sandwiches. A 1.5 kg bag was £3.50, quite reasonable given the high quality of this flour. I also bought two sausage rolls, still warm from the oven, rich and meaty topped with a delicious fruit chutney and encased in lovely thin, light flaky pastry and though I usually shun wheat flour I couldn’t resist. I also bought Dan a very chocolaty brownie. We ate the sausage rolls on a bench on Barnes Green and they really were scrumptious with a very high meat content. Two Peas coin them as “the best in Barnes” and I can quite believe it. Dan was super-impressed with his brownie and my stomach didn’t puff out like a football after eating the sausage roll so a very high quality wheat flour pastry.

After our early lunch we nipped across the road to the Sun pub for a relaxing drink and then wended our way back to Barnes Bridge for the train journey home. Waiting for the train we saw the Red Arrows in formation high in the sky perfect day.

A perfect day.