Moo Cluck

Moo Cluck vegan chocolate chip cookies are not the same as regular chocolate chip cookies. There are no eggs or dairy products in the ingredients, and even though it says there is real chocolate in there somewhere, neither of us could figure out where. We ate them anyway, after big bowls of really delicious roasted red pepper soup and some little grilled cheese sandwiches that were mostly just grilled spelt bread. I made my cookies extra vegan by eating them with a big mug of cold milk.

I haven't been cooking.

My colleague told me during his first year of teaching he lost 20 pounds. "I would go all day without eating running from place to place, getting this or that done," he said. Then by the end of the day he would be so hungry he would devour an entire fillet of salmon, a pot of rice, and finally get to work on a half gallon of Edy's pumpkin ice cream before bed. By the end of the week, he'd cleaned out Gristedes' entire stock of the autumn-flavored dessert, his body under such a hyperthyroidic stress-trance he seemed to burn twice the calories of what he consumed while consuming them. "That stuff is goood," he said, laughing gruffly with a vestige of laringitis.