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I enjoy these cool, drippy days when the winter rains finally come to the Bay Area; they give an illusion of changing seasons rare in our temperate climate. It's nice to put on my pumpkin-colored raincoat and tweed cap for the first time in months and head out to buy a new umbrella. It rains so infrequently during spring, summer, and early autumn, I invariably forget where I stored the previous season's umbrella and must replace it. I suspect that one day I'll open the right drawer or closet and find a mother load of previous season's parapluies.

While I'm out umbrella shopping, I'm also likely to pick up a few bunches of beets. For as much as I love eating adorable baby beets in the spring, I like them even better in the chilly days of autumn. The smell of damp earth and caramelized sugar while they roast seems to warm me from the inside. Plus, what better to counteract a damp, gray day than an intense infusion of beet pink?

Although I know it's possible to think of the pink as something of a menace, an infectious hue that must be segregated from all other foods until the last possible minute, I love that the color looks almost too intense to eat. That such a bright hue accompanies such rich, almost dirt-like taste always surprises me. Many of my favorite beet dishes take advantage of the pink, letting it bleed freely into the dish, and ensuring a truly dramatic presentation on the plate.

I'd been waiting for it to feel like summer, which used to be so clearly marked--with the last day of class opening, and my birthday party at the end of August closing it neatly--that I still need official, mostly edible ways of getting back my Original Summer Feeling. Which is actually a season, I have to remind myself, and not a feeling at all.

Well yes, technically, but for whom does crossing off the corresponding day in the calendar actually mark the change from Spring to Summer? OK, all people who've better things to do than construct situations that will remind them of the idea of summer, point taken. And the first heralder of summer this year was not the usual wafting barbecue smell in the neighbourhood, or a sweet little peach, but a sun hatted, grass-lounging, gin-toting Martha making the most of the sunshine in the city.

I may live a mere thirty miles away, but it's an entirely other weather zone. Her sunny days are usually my grey ones, and vice versa. I ogled the pictures of her strawberries in the sunshine, stared out the window into a dense grey mist, cursed a little, and boiled the kettle for another cup of tea. Soon, I told myself, soon.

I should start by saying that I am by no means freakishly terrified of illnesses of the tropics, or any sort for that matter, and quietly disapprove of companions that tsk tsk at every off putting, but delicious delight. I will almost always risk various strains of cholera for a bite of street food, and delight in tasty moulds, barely cooked meat, things made with blood. I have picked the wriggling, parasitic worms from a monkfish liver, made a pink-centred torchon of it, and feasted. I don't worry too much about these things and yet...

Having said this, I saved the oil from my potato confit--flavoured strongly with garlic and rosemary, a delicious oil for making little crusts of bread to be spread with foie gras mousse for a salad, or for frying an egg for breakfast. But on day 2, after eating the crostini and salad, in an inexplicable fit, I was driven to pour the excess strained oil away. I was paralysed by a desperate fear of botulism and simultaneously amused by the deadly, foodborne illness pun in which I found myself.

The purple potato is of the delicious, dense, mealy, anti-oxidant rich variety. Its colour is a vibrant, but fragile perk, which often ends up less like shades of deep purple and more like the browny-purply destiny of all play doh scraps: smells like play doh, tastes like play doh, but looks like...a discoloured blob.

This is because those purple pigments are water-soluble. So when steamed, boiled and mashed, as potatoes often are, the purple tends to bleed into its surroundings and/or turn scary colours unless its enviroment is acidic enough. Or fatty?

It doesn't get much fattier than a confit, which, though used liberally to describe all sorts of things these days, is a method of cooking that I always associate with classic duck confit (salting/flavouring, total immersion in fat, low temperature, slow cooking, and preserving).

For dinner--I won't say cooked as there was hardly any cooking involved--I drowned two purple potatoes with rosemary and garlic in a pot of fat, sliced all my nearly-too-ripe raclette, sliced half a white-speckled saucisson sec, rounded-up all available pickles, and finally, though my heart wasn't in it at all, put together a small, useless, gesture of a salad--you know the sort.

"Just look at those curved loins and muscular buttocks--just what we'd expect from a fit, racy bitch," I overheard. But by the time I managed to get a peek at the telly, Glyn must've already changed the channel: something about Birmingham, Crufts, and an Australian Shepherd taking the pastoral round.

I teeter between being cuted out (as in, I find every dog so cute that I squeal as one affected by severe cuteness) and being mildly piqued by the limiting of genetic pools to preserve the idea of breed. It's the cultural and ethnic mutt in me--the bitch, one might say--that finds the frighteningly detailed classifications of these carefully bred pedigrees, or purebreds, distasteful.

Don't get me wrong: I rooted for the Welsh Springer, and my family had a little tricolour King Charles Cavalier, rightly named for pedigree and year with the letter H, bred by the Renard family of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, whose mother was a French national champion and whose puppies were worth a grade A liver on the Parisian black market.

How do you know that your hot sauce addiction has gone too far? The above bottle of chipotle Tabasco had been in my possession for a mere 24 hours when that photo was taken. During the course of that day, I ate it on a grilled cheese, I used it in a marinade for fajitas, I had a snack of it on tortilla chips, and then ate it on the fajitas themselves.

When your daily hot sauce consumption can be measured in ounces, that's probably how you know. So, okay, maybe I'm addicted. It's my brother's fault, really. On a visit home last year, I saw him shaking it onto a slice of pepperoni pizza. "It's good," he said, "It's really good." One bite and I was hooked.

Families all over the world are in the midst, or preparing for Passover and Easter. I never celebrated Easter in any way other than eating my giant chocolate Cadbury eggs and candies and know as much about Pesach as I do Italian politics. And so I found myself this afternoon at sites like askmoses.com, and faqjew.com--seriously--partly for the cyber encyclopedias of Jewish history and partly for the virtual culinary libraries of kosher recipes. See, to my boyfriend's distress, I am a matzah skeptic.

He tells me that matzah spread thickly with butter, makes for a delicious snack, and I wrinkle my nose. Because while I love Glyn's matzah ball soup, pictured above, I think that butter--no matter how sweet and salted--couldn't possibly make that wafer, in its dry, cardboard-like, state, delicious. Maybe, as askmoses.com suggests with its various history links, it's because I don't associate matzah so much with the hasty departure of the Israelites from Egypt, the exodus that marked the birth of the Jewish nation. Matzah, the primary symbol of passover, may just be the most significant of snacks, at least during this celebration. So maybe I will have that matzah tartine...

They say that the developed taste for oysters, and a few same-sex flings are timeless. The veritable hallmark of style. They say this with a smutty smile, a raised eyebrow, and an obscene oscillating tongue--they're the Romans you see. And though they encouraged oyster eating--among other things--as far north as Hadrian's Wall during their occupation, for centuries after they left England, oysters fell out of favour and were rarely eaten--except for those poor Dickensian characters hungry enough to pickle them. Because, face it, you have to be pretty desperate to collect the little critters, and spend your evening forcing open their shells, for mouthfuls of low calorie brine and squish. But like fashionable things often do, they came in and out again. They became just for the miserable, just for the rich, they became strictly for those with sophisticated palates and so on. In. Out again.

But one too many oyster pies, baked up by grubby fingered workers, or one too many raw hors d'oeuvres parties at the beach house, and the polluted waters of the Channel and the Sussex coastline simply couldn't keep up. The treasured bivalves had to be largely farmed by the seventeenth century, that is to say, artificially bred, mostly for rich, fat people, for hundreds of years. As I imagine it in my lifetime, people believe that oysters belong to a certain class--the best get the best sort of thing. See, the people who can't afford oysters, can't possibly understand oysters anyway--their complicated, subtle flavour and texture, their corresponding prices.

But it occurred to me last week that it's no longer so. Oysters have become what ordinary men offer ordinary women when they want to get into their ordinary, elastic pants--it used to be sushi, I think. But no more, now it's oysters: the bourgeois delicacy--briny and raw, surrounded by myth and history, indicative of class and taste, seemingly impenetrable shell, possibly fatal, zincy little bastards.

What's round, crunchy, salty, and excellent for snacking? Potato chips, obviously, but why limit yourself? For the last year or so, here at Chez Marthe, radishes have been a snack food of choice. It sounds like one of those healthy eating lies. Fat free yogurt is not as good melting into black bean soup as sour cream. Portobello mushrooms, though delicious, don't really taste like steak at all. But a radish, sliced into crimson-rimmed coins and dipped in your best sea salt, have all the makings of a healthy snack for the ages.

I read once about a scientific study about why we like noisy, crunchy foods. If I recall correctly, they tested corn chips. Apparently, we love the violence of the sound, the louder the better. A cold, fresh radish crunched between the teeth certainly meets those criteria. And while they may not taste like cool ranch, when their natural pepperiness is augmented with salt, they are anything but bland.

If you're feeling a little indulgent, radishes and salt served with generously buttered bread and a glass of Sancerre makes for one of my favorite cocktail hour treats. Or if it's already time for dinner, I like to cut the radishes into wedges and toss them with raw sugar snaps or blanched green beans, mesclun, and sherry vinaigrette for an excellent accompaniment to Tejal's Oeurves en Cocotte.

I also love these rosy beauties julienned in with the cabbage for fish tacos, topping sesame noodles, or tossed into spicy stir-fries at the very last minute. I stir thin-sliced radishes and apples into chicken salad and diced ones into couscous with currants, almonds, and herbs. Still, no matter what I use them for, I always slice off a few fat disks and sprinkle them lightly with salt. I'm always in the mood for a snack.

I'm not convinced that organic and natural foods are always better. Local is nearly always better, but sometimes organic doesn't necessarily equal quality. At its best, the word "organic" signifies that the product was loved and nurtured, cared for rather than doused in chemicals. At its worst, a zucchini is a zucchini is a zucchini, unless it's an organic zucchini, then its a zucchini that cost six dollars.

But when it comes to eggs, I'm absolutely convinced. I buy the fussiest eggs I can get my hands on. I like them cage-free, organic, antibiotic-free, fresh, local, and fed an all vegetarian diet. My reasons for this are entirely selfish. Sure, I guess I'm glad that the chickens that laid my eggs weren't confined to cages, but their chickeny happiness is not my main motivation. I like fancy eggs because they look and taste so much better. I guess that pampered chickens lay eggs that pamper me. Lately, I've been buying Rock Island eggs, produced just up coast in Sonoma.

The yolks are a beautiful, bright orange that makes cakes, custards, and mayonnaise equally richly tinted. They fry, scramble, and most especially poach better. They taste fantastic. I'm sure the freshness is a big part of why they're so good. Perhaps if I could get my hands on industrial eggs this fresh they'd taste every bit as good, but I guess I'll never know. For now, even if my zucchini are average, my eggs will always be fantastic, and yes, even organic.