Yesterday, I put twelve cookies into the oven but when I took them out there were only eleven. My roommate says he got impatient. And as if that weren't enough, he dunked it in water before eating it, he said "to cool it off."

Stewart says, "not cool."

My good friend has lived on the Upper West Side for almost three years and I've lived in New York for a year and a half, yet until tonight I had never been to her apartment. It had become a point of contention between us and, for me, a symbol of the disconnectedness of the inhabitants of the city. There was only one way to start making things right, I brought my supplies in a yogurt container:

1 stick of butter (wrapped)
1 egg (in a plastic bag)

and in an empty cookie mix tin (ironically):

1/2 cup turbinado sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oats
1/3 cup coconut flakes
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

[Sidenote: I did not bring vanilla because I am finally using the extract I began steeping in September, it is delicious, but in a 750ml Stolichnaya Vodka bottle with a loose top it is hard to transport, I need to keep a travel-size bottle for occasions such as this.]

I first mixed the butter and egg and then, in a fit of experimentation (if this works maybe we could market it), added all the rest of the ingredients from the tin at once. It did not combine easily, the large particulate ingredients getting between the flour and the egg/butter mixture. However, Aurora put her fork aside, washed her hands, and went at it, squeezing the dough between her fingers until we had a dense ball like pie crust. The cookies were a bit too grainy but nothing a little tinkering couldn't solve. My friend enjoyed them and I think we buried the hatchet over my long neglect -- we made a plan to meet regularly but when it came to actually setting a day, balked.

Stewart is spending four weeks in Spain. Just before he left, he and I made a triple half batch of chocolate chocolate chunk cookies for his elementary school class's second annual reunion get-together. Working with a tough oven and small baking trays, I burned my finger and not a few of the cookies, but the responsible substance using former classmates munched them happily through the foosball tournament, even with compliments and offers of financing for a bakery down the road -- one of Stewart's semi-former admirers asked us for a business plan, and so we are composing a poem. We added a Starburst candy to the center of one cookie, which we marked with an X and intended for David to eat, but to our dismay it circulated through the party and was picked up by an innocent bystander (sorry Anthony).

Five days later I was in Providence for New Years Eve, where I made vegan chocolate chip cookies with walnuts for the assembled revelers. I started with two sticks of Earth Balance. Earlier, at Whole Foods, I asked my friend if she had brown sugar and she said she uses molasses and sugar (her girlfriend refuted this claim but supported experimentation), so in the place of 1 cup of brown sugar I used 3/4 cup vegan white sugar and 1/4 cup blackstrap molasses (blackstrap, according to the baking science textbook I got for Christmas, is "inedible" but we beg to differ) -- I am convinced that this is a breakthrough, I would use maybe a different kind of molasses and less, but I have long been suspicious of brown sugar and hope that greater control and independence will result from the change. The dough turned dark brown and had a definite molasses flavor but after baking mellowed (in taste, not color, they were almost as dark as chocolate cookies). To replace the egg, I made an applesauce of five Golden Delicious, five Granny Smith, two Honeycrisp and two Bartlett pears -- the cookies had nice bits of peel showing and held together perfectly. And they were a hit. It was a good night for baking overall, including pistachio-fennel-apricot bread, cornbread, vegan carrot cake cupcakes and whole wheat dough veggie (cheese-less) pizzas.