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We all know that gluttony is a bad thing. It is the subtext of every finger-wagging article on the American obesity epidemic, of every statistic on how many tons of fossil fuels we consume, of how many gallons of water we divert from point A to point B, of how many cups of coffee we drink and how many bars of chocolate we eat. I have not been sleepwalking through my reading; I know that gluttony is a bad thing, but this did not stop me from buying 10 pounds of vegetables at the market yesterday morning and then tamping them all down into a 6-quart Dutch oven, melting them into three nights' worth of ratatouille.

I am trying, as best as I can, not to fall on another shopworn description of a farmer's market in summertime. It is an easy fallback for me, the market in August, when almost everything (save my beloved sour cherries) is in season and producing at riotous levels. I have never been good at self-denial, and there has been more than one weekend over the past 14 years where I have completely disregarded my budget, refrigerator space, energy and patience for chopping vegetables and slicing fruit for hours on end, just because there is something about all of this food in one place, bumping up against each other, that just shouts out take me home. I have become a master (mistress?) at carrying home more than I can carry, seeing how many blocks I can carry those damn plastic bags until my fingers go numb, and developing forearms like Popeye. Bearing all these things in mind, I consider it a small miracle that I left the market yesterday with only a fraction of what I wanted to buy at first sight, and I still ended up with three pounds of eggplant, three pounds of green and yellow zucchini, three pounds of beefsteak tomatoes, two pounds of zebra tomatoes, a giant bouquet of basil, a bag of rocambole garlic, two pounds of Elephant Heart plums (which I've been craving since March) and four pounds of apricots. I don't need a lot of arm-twisting to buy apricots, I don't need to be seduced, but I was seduced anyway. It's that ripe orange hue, that ridiculously hot blush on the skin, the texture like butter, the juice like sunshine, the taste like love.

Two years ago, during the height of apricot season, I found a cake in Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen that I made on a weekly basis, and would have made three times a day if I could get away with it. It is made with a cornmeal-enriched butter cake and fresh apricots that have been poached in a syrup of water, sugar, honey and a vanilla bean. You spread half the batter in the bottom of a 10" springform; top the base with soft poached apricot halves; crumble the other half of the batter, streusel-like, over the apricots, brush the top with the reduced poaching syrup and bake it all until it is bubbly and fragrant and perfect. At the time, one of my local deli owners lucked into a consignment of Tasmanian leatherwood honey, and put it out on the shelf with a sign saying "best honey in the world." How could I resist? The resulting cake was so heady, floral, complex and just plain gorgeous that I couldn't believe it was legal to eat it. (If you are not familiar with leatherwood honey -- as I was not until that summer -- it is very much like sourwood honey in perfume and taste. If you are not familiar with sourwood honey, try to make friends with someone who lives in North Carolina and ask them nicely if they will send you a jar.)

We have this cake in our future, made not with leatherwood honey, but with the heather honey I bought at Valvona and Crolla in Edinburgh in May. The apricots are soft and pillowy and full of vanilla. The syrup is bright orange and smells good enough to be dabbed behind my ears.

More Girly PTMYB Trivia:  Yesterday, on another page, I mewled and puked for a bit about my adventures with henna.  At the time, I didn't think that shiny new-penny hair would be worth wiping green goo off my forehead for two hours.  I was wrong.  Consider me a slave to the goo.