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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.

Dear friends,

You may have wondered if it were just your imagination, or if the pickings around here had become a bit slim since Sunday night's sous-vide rant.  It is not your imagination.  This week was the culmination of a summer's work at the box factory, the week in which we crunched number after number after number, put them all together on spreadsheets, and then sent them to the customer on whose account I work; all of this effort has been to convince a customer with whom we've had a 20-year relationship that we want to extend that relationship.  Unfortunately, they are a public company, as are we.  On a person-to-person, day-to-day level, our willingness to go the extra mile to accommodate the customer is appreciated by nearly everyone with whom we work , but at the end of the day, there is only one metric that matters to a public company.  I am keeping every digit I have crossed that we have what it takes to hit that metric, that our hard work will pay off, and that we get to keep dancing with Big Cosmetic Company for two more years.

So I'll own up, dear friends:  I've been more than a little distracted this week, this month, this summer.  But now the deed has been done, the project has been put to bed, and I have other concerns, namely what should be done with the two pints of black figs in our kitchen.  We have been getting great figs this summer at the fruit and vegetable markets in my neighborhood, from small ones the size of pecans to large ones the length of my thumb, green-stemmed, round-bottomed.  I came to figs late in life, eating them only in Fig Newtons as a kid, moving on in college to dried Calimyrna figs, which I used to buy in the Strip District in Pittsburgh.  I shied away from the fresh ones for years, having read somewhere -- I can't remember where, but I'm thinking that it was a bogus source -- that if you couldn't pick the fig off the tree in California or Italy, it was not a fig worth eating.  I don't even want to think of how many figs I passed by in the last ten years.

These figs are worth eating.  The trick, now, is to figure out how.  Nearly every baking book I own has an idea: fig cake, fig cupcakes, fig jam, fig pie, fig tart.  Nigel Slater has a tart on which I've had my eye for years:  shortcrust pastry, figs, honey, mascarpone.  I decide right, that's it, it's time to make this tart once and for all, and then I stop, thinking of those figs sliced, sauteed briefly in melted butter, sprinkled with sugar, shaken in the pan and tumbled into a bowl with a little blob of mascarpone or creme fraiche waiting to cut the sugar.  I think about those figs cut into crosshatch, drizzled with the heather honey we brought home from Scotland, a little orange flower water shaken over all of it.  I think of cranking up the broiler, crosshatching the figs, filling them with bittersweet chocolate chips, popping them under the broiler for a few seconds, just until the chocolate melts, calling out the creme fraiche again.  I will contemplate all of these as I go into the kitchen and, purely for quality-control purposes, take two figs out of one of the pint baskets, bite into them, feel the sugar against my tongue and palate, contemplate the rose-colored seeds and try to keep juice from running down my neck.  Did I mention that this year's figs are really, really good?

Well, not really.  It was not an LSD-induced freakout.  It was just a Sunday morning, when I found myself with some time on my hands; a blueberry and calamine face mask that, coincidentally, was the exact color of my pajamas; a cameraphone, and the willingness to make a damn fool of myself.  Considering the circumstances, I think the result could have been much worse.

I was *this* close to making custard this weekend, just to prove a point. 

In the end, I did not, simply because even with this weekend's near-surrealistic levels of humidity and heat in New York, the stove Chez PTMYB was hopping all day yesterday.  The lovely Bunni came to visit, to get out of the heat, to join us in the viewing of our new Comic Strip box set (with a sidetrip into the splattery goodness of Scanners) and to finally get her share of the Blogathon focaccia, which I promised to bake for her the next time she came over.  I had promised her a share of the corn salsa, too, so off I went to the market to pick up a dozen ears of corn and as many tomatoes as I could get home without smashing into juice.  Within five minutes of getting to the market, I knew that there would be pie, too; I could not walk around smelling apricots and blueberries and basil all around me, and leave without something for pie.  I ended up with bags of something, bags of raspberries and blackberries and blueberries and a pint of day-neutral strawberries, so sweet that you can't help but smile as you eat them, all bumping happily against each other in my big ceramic bowl, dressed with sugar and lime juice and cornstarch, turned into a pie shell, topped with a lattice top and baked into the bubbling purple riot that is bumbleberry pie.  Because we all filled ourselves so well on corn and tomatoes and bread last night, we still have almost the whole pie left in the fridge.  We could breakfast for a week on this pie.  My more restrained impulses won out.  We would not be having custard, in any form.  No vanilla pudding, no creme chantilly, no creme brulee, no lemon curd, not even ice cream, which normally I know is correct for pie but this time I felt would be overkill, cutting into the sweet sharp flavor of our purple pie.

So I won't be cooking eggs and sugar and milk (or cream or juice) just to prove a point, and yet I can still feel myself spoiling for a fight, wanting to prove something.  It has been almost 30 years since my stepdad was foolhardy enough to buy my mother a Daisy Seal-a-Meal for Christmas, almost 30 years since we took a pass at making big batches of stew, vacuum-sealing them, freezing them and reheating them in boiling-water bags, only to decide that the results weren't worth the added time, the cost of the Seal-a-Meal bags or the increased amount of plastic in our garbage, 30 years since we said goodbye to all that, and yet I am still, still hearing about how boil-in-bag -- excuse me, I mean sous-vide -- cookery is the wave of the future, the truc par excellence of the smartest chefs in New York City, the Girl Most Likely To Make the Transition from the Restaurant to the Home Kitchen.  I read it again this morning, in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, from the enthusiastic pen of Amanda Hesser.

I will admit that I have not worked in restaurant kitchens in years, and that it's easy for me to take pot shots from my lumpy uncomfortable living room chair.  I have not tried watermelon vacuum-sealed to a pressure point that pushes the fruit cells together and gives it a meat-like texture, nor have I tried Wylie Dufresne's flash-pickled water chestnuts, and I probably should before I tar the whole sous-vide movement with a wide brush.   There is a difference between the type of boil-in-bag cooking that exemplifies the worst of large-scale industrial food processing (Weight Watchers chicken alfredo, anyone?) and the careful, methodical testing going on in fine restaurant kitchens, although every time I think about the sous-vide experiments Ms. Hesser describes, I think of the passage in The Taste of America in which John and Karen Hess describe the trend of luxury restaurants relying on precooked frozen food.  (So far, the restaurants in Ms. Hesser's article do show some scruples about using fine, fresh produce and smart flavor-building principles, and I hope that they will continue to do so.)  I should show a little restraint, and not just work myself up into a lather based on something I read in the New York Times.  So I told myself, until I read this:

Chefs have found less lofty ways to employ [sous-vide] as well.  At CityZen, in the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, they make ice cream bases in sous-vide.  "There's no putting your sugar and egg and cream in a pan and stirring," says Eric Ziebold, the chef.  His pastry chef blends the ingredients, seals them in a bag and cooks it in water.

I am trying to repeat the Litany of the Humble Pastry Cook, the one where I remind myself that in a restaurant kitchen, speed is the name of the game, that flavor may be paramount (if you're working in a good kitchen) but efficiency follows close behind.  I remember my own pastry-monkey work, in which I churned ice creams and sorbets while simultaneously keeping an eye and ear and nose on the cookies baking in the convection oven across the kitchen, and in which the pastry sous-chef stood at the stove, making ice cream bases while the flourless chocolate cakes baked in another convection oven across the kitchen, and while egg whites and boiling sugar syrup whapped around in a Kitchen Aid bowl, waiting to be turned into semifreddo.  At any given moment, we had to do at least three things at once and not blink at any of them, lest the custard scramble or the egg whites and sugar stick to the bowl or the cakes overbake or the butterfat separate out of the ice cream base due to overchurning.  In this kind of environment, you don't have the time to ooh and ahh over how pretty the whole custard-building enterprise is; you only have time for a brief appreciation of how egg yolks and sugar beaten together turn a light lemony color, and you certainly can't stand there, enraptured, as the proteins in the egg yolks do their thing and turn everything creamy and smooth and unctuous on the tongue.  If the pastry chef at CityZen can get a perfect creme anglaise by mixing everything together into a sous-vide bag and setting the whole thing into gently simmering water, then who am I to get all waspish about it?

No, I'm sorry.  I can't do it.  I am a home baker, that's who I am.  Food-industry magazines describe people like me as "foodies," a term that I have never liked (except when used by Joy Rotondi, the editor and webmaster of foodies.com and one of the nicest women alive), or as "passionate amateurs," a phrase that makes me want to hurl a nice heavy glass ashtray through a nearby window.  Food-industry magazines also describe people like me as the ones who are the first in line to buy into the home-game version of restaurant technology, which means that it's only a matter of time before I will be queuing up to buy Seal-a-Meal 2005 (This Time It's Personal!) for my custard-making needs.  Except that it's not, and I won't.  I *like* that moment where the egg yolks lighten to their lemon-colored goodness, and I love the moment where the custard reaches its moment of optimum thickness.  I even like the element of danger involved, the temptation to cook the custard as thickly as possible, and the knowledge that if you push it too far, you will overdo it and end up with sweet scrambled eggs, and you have to use your brain, your eyes, fingers and tongue to keep that from happening.  I love the tightrope walk of knowing how many egg yolks to use:  skimp on eggs and you sacrifice thickness; overdo it and you run the risk of letting the egg dominate all other flavors, an unlovely phenomenon with a lovely name: "overegging the pudding."  This is why I do what I do, and until the sous-vide enthusiasts can convince me that the end result of their bagged custard is far superior to my jerry-rigged double-boiler custard,  I will refuse to give up this impractical, time-consuming, luscious dance.

Edit:  I had the feeling that the sous-vide story would catch the gimlet eye of Regina Schrambling at gastropoda.  Reader, I was not disappointed.  Scroll down to the seventh bullet point from the top of the page.

I heard it first on NY1, but I didn't want to believe it. But Gothamist tells it true:  After 25 years of catering to actors, writers, directors, producers and just general theatreheads (like the teenage Bakerina, who was lucky enough to see, among other shows, Whose Life Is It Anyway? with Mary Tyler Moore and the original production of 'night, Mother with Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates), Applause Books is closing at the end of August.

Some of my friends and acquaintances have suggested that I have a habit of falsely romanticizing the past, and that I am taking an elitist point of view when I suggest that deep-discount bookselling as practiced by online booksellers and large chain stores might not be an untarnished blessing, and that there might be a price to be paid for cheap, convenient one-stop Christmas shopping.  I am not about to argue that New York was a better place to live 20 or 30 years ago; anyone who lived in the city during the infamous days of near-bankruptcy in the 1970's can tell you otherwise.  And I won't trot out the hoary old "in *my* day, you could rent a 6-bedroom apartment on Avenue D for $3.50 a month, and sure the building was full of serial killers, but at least we didn't have any damn yuppies in the neighborhood!" chestnut that inevitably overtakes any discussion of the closure of a long-term business.  I will only say this:  Once upon a time, for all its many faults and problems, New York was a city that had a bookstore for nearly any specialty:  theatre, dance, travel, business, boating, music; if you loved it, you could find a bookstore that specialized in it, and, in the best instances, fostered a community of like-minded enthusiasts.  Now these stores are finding themselves unable to compete in a faster, more discount-conscious, shrewd age, and they are closing their doors, leaving a void in the community that is difficult, if not impossible, to fill.

I will admit to a bit of a bias:  For 12 years, I have bought more books than I can count at the magnificent Kitchen Arts and Letters on the Upper East Side.  The staff knows me, and I know them.  The owner of the shop is tickled by my ongoing egg book project, and will spend an hour chatting with me about the best places to do research -- when he is not busy answering the phone, talking to food writers, culinary historians, journalists, or enthusiastic customers from all over the world (including Nigella Lawson, who writes in How to Eat that she has a habit of going out to dinner, maybe drinking a bit too much, returning home, realizing that the shops are still open in New York, calling Kitchen Arts and saying "What do you have that's new?", and then suddenly receiving a huge box and an even huger credit card bill a month later).  The store manager knows me so well that within 45 seconds of my walking through the door, he has amassed a stack of books and is asking, innocently, "Have we had a conversation about these, yet?", knowing that if I don't buy the whole lot at that moment, I will probably be back three days later.  This is a shop that has a lot of fans, and while it is doing well, there are never any guarantees for the future.  On one visit, I saw a pair of young women perusing the table of new releases.  "Oh!," said one of the women, picking up a new celebrity chef cookbook, "I want this one!"  Her friend looked over and clicked her tongue.  "Oh, you don't want to pay that.  Wait until you get home and you can get it from Amazon for 30% off.  That's what I do -- I find what I want in the stores, and then I get it all from Amazon."  I knew then that the store manager was a better person than I am, because he did not fly over the counter and roundhouse punch her, the way I would have.

Applause Books will remain open through August 30, for anyone who will be in New York for the rest of the summer and who would like to say goodbye and thank you for 25 delightful years.