A housemate’s girlfriend makes wonderful pudding-based cookies and today I test drove the recipe. Ingredient #4 or so was “7 oz pudding mix” and I was glad for the weight indication as the rest of the recipe was by volume, a system I never understood for compressible semifluids like flour and brown sugar which makes as much sense as saying “two yards of gasoline” to me. I ripped open seven 1 oz packets of pudding and soon found myself working with some type of pastry cement when I realized I had been overjoyed in mass too early. I used sugar free pudding which is about 1/3 the weight as regular pudding mix to produce the same volume. This was a mistake even my dog, Max, would not suffer so I went to my memory hole of failed cuisine, the terrace at the end of my house. Somewhere, there is a hive of squirrels and field mice that are excreting masonry.