HILDRETH STREET FRUIT & VEG STALL, BALHAM SW12

Please don’t go there.  I tried it one Saturday thinking that a fruit & veg stall has to be cheaper and better than a supermarket, right?  Wrong.  The stall had sold out of most things when I went this particular afternoon at around 4pm.  In hindsight, thank goodness.

I bought tomatoes, a baking potato, some blueberries and some ginger.  The tomatoes were incredibly tasteless and really pithy.  I actually threw them away, and I could not believe I found myself doing so.  I adore tomatoes, I would go so far as to say they are one of my top 5 foods and I always have them in the fridge.  It was devastating to throw them in the bin!

I was assured by the stallholder that the potato he sold me was “perfect” for baking. Wrong again.  This potato was only perfect for going straight to the bin.   After baking it at a low temperature for 2 hours (normally my method for a perfect baked potato), this “thing” (I can’t bring myself to call it a potato) came out all powdery in parts and raw in others.  I tried giving it a blast in the microwave, which I would normally always avoid for a baked potato.  But alas, no joy.  I found myself having to pick out the partly cooked bits, just so I could have a dinner.  Absolutely disgraceful quality.  The ginger?  Well its hard to go wrong with ginger isn’t it?  And the blueberries were not bad, but they were so much more expensive than Tesco, which kind of defeated the whole point of using the fruit and veg stall in the first place!  Never again.