After school, during peak feeding time, I focused on fueling. My two younger sisters followed my lead. My mom, a depression kid who’d done without, relished stocking the kitchen, furnishing our hysterical hunger with endless goodies.

The blender sat between the breadbox and the fridge, which had a giant freezer drawer below. It was continuously supplied with several flavors of ice cream. Shakes were my specialty. I began with a clean slate of chocolate, vanilla or coffee ice cream, adding what was within easy reach. This often included an egg for volume and a whole Mallomar cookie, tossed in a short arc from cabinet to blender. In those days, when nothing more than a sensible swirl of fudge or a scant handful of pecans was mixed into ice cream, the addition of Mallomars made my shakes the gold standard, or so my sisters told me.

The Mallomars sat conveniently above the blender, next to what we called “squashed flies,” a long flat cookie sandwich with a mashed raisin filling. For the uninitiated, Mallomars are a thin round cookie, topped with a perfectly sized marshmallow mound, all covered in dark chocolate. They’ve been a seasonal cookie for more than a century, going on hiatus during summer, the chocolate-melting season. This made them especially welcome when they returned just in time for the school year.

My dad delighted in describing his childhood tour to the Mallomar factory in the Bronx. The chocolate flowed over marshmallow-topped cookies as they traveled along the conveyor belt. The genius of this concave belt, my father assured us, was that it directed a river of chocolate beneath the cookies, so they would be covered on their bottoms too. His tale always ended in glee: a freckled kid in knickers, biting into a single Mallomar “right off the line, so fresh.”

Those Mallomars, when added to my shakes, were, in fact, a tad gritty, actually better in concept than in reality, though their family history added something special. Ravenous after school, we didn’t stop at shakes, roving the kitchen as hungry hoards swept through ancient towns, leaving nothing behind. My sisters favored the “junk drawer,” as we called it, which sat below the wall oven, loaded with mini bags of cheese doodles and chips. I wasn’t opposed to junk on principle, but the fridge was my mecca. While rummaging the shelves, the key was to edge around the leftovers, so the dent I made would be so minor that they could still be used for our occasional all-leftover dinners, a feast we adored.

Through trial and error I noticed how some refrigerated treasures held up especially well and were even tastier cold. This was a good thing before microwaves gave a quick blast to heat food. Also, because the toaster oven, while excellent for melted cheese bread or cinnamon toast, took too much time to do its job, which resulted in a giant whiff of good things coasting out of the kitchen towards the adults’ world.

Our kitchen attacks pushed my parents to invent more after-school eating limits. But these only made me hungrier. The key was to strike fast, eat food cold and then vanish into my room to listen to music while pretending to do my homework.

The wonders of our privileged kitchen were numerous. There were dried apricot rolls that stuck to my teeth; little custard cups, ready for the spooning; and Danish butter cookies in a large blue tin, as well as leftover party savories like Madeira glazed ham and cooked shrimp with a cocktail sauce generously spiked with horseradish. But my mother’s meatballs stood out. A hand-mix of all things meaty, they were heavy and filling, about twice the size of golf balls. Better yet, each one was covered with just enough sauce to mingle with the meat in my mouth, but not so much that their coldness was off-putting. The balls sat atop sauced spaghetti, which I treasured cold. But this was years before America discovered pasta salads and cold sesame noodles, so my sisters stopped short at cold spaghetti.

That meant more for me.

My level of hunger was so intense in those years that by my junior year, mom took to fending us off with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones on anything she planned to serve for dinner.

That ended my foraging career, or so I thought, until years later when I left the sanctity of my mom’s kitchen to forage in the world beyond.