I tried not to, I really did; but what happened was this. My septuagenarian mum decided she so much liked a purslane mallung I once made that she commissioned a re-run for her birthday lunch. Comes the day, and I did what all us inner-city-gourmet-seasonal-provisioning types do these days and whizzed off to my local Farmers’ Market. I had bought the first lot here from a Turk whose face had broken out in a banjo-plucking-Deliverance smile of pleasure to think anyone knew what the weedy stuff was he was trying to flog, let alone was going to take it home and cook it. This time, I smiled myself as I approached his stall, as we ethnics do, anticipating bonding over wrinkled-foreskin-like green chillies from some obscure ex-Soviet state or the virulently cerise arcane brassica grown from seeds smuggled among underthings in a dusty Black Sea steamer trunk.
