For those who have spent any time with me, these cookies need no introduction. Elementary school classmates will remember them from bake sales and sleepovers. Childhood friends will remember baking them (and sneaking cookie dough) at my parents’ house. The same friends will remember eating two or three or four on afternoons at Ocean Beach in high school. College friends in Boston pounced on these cookies when they arrived in care packages.

And now I bake them, too, at least monthly. They have served as thank you’s, birthday presents, peace offerings, and potluck fodder. They are a chewy, chocolatey reminder of home, every time.

Why are these so good? Let me explain. Have you ever felt that chocolate chip cookies bury the chocolate in a broad, boring expanse of lackluster sugar cookie? I have. But not so with these. The oats and walnuts make the whole cookie chewy, interesting, and worthwhile. Freezing them before baking adds to the texture, preventing the cookie from flattening out in the oven. And there is no shortage of chocolate–and nary a raisin in sight.

First they were Mom’s house cookie; now they are mine, too. We have found none better.

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Make it double chocolate? I’ve got you: Bittersweet Double Chocolate Cookies (the only other cookie worthy of a spot in our regular rotation!)

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Mom’s oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Makes about four baking sheets’ worth of cookies–about 48 cookies, depending on how big you make each one
Originally published, somewhere, as “Barbara’s chocolate oatmeal cookies.” But since Mom clipped the recipe from a newspaper sometime in the 1980s–i.e., pre-Internet–it has been impossible to locate the original source.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups (340.2g) butter
1 cup (225g) granulated sugar
1 cup (215g) packed brown sugar
3 eggs
1 1/2 tablespoons (23ml) hot water
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/2 cups (245g) flour
1 1/2 teaspoons (7g) baking soda
1 teaspoon (6g) salt
3 cups (330g) rolled oats
1+ cups (120g or more) chopped walnuts
12 to 14 ounces (340-396g) chocolate chips

Instructions

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter with the two sugars, then beat in the eggs thoroughly. Add the hot water and vanilla and mix well, then add flour, soda and salt, beating until smooth. Stir in the oats, nuts and chocolate chips. (Don’t have an electric mixer? I’ve mixed the sugar and butter with my hands, a pastry cutter, and so on.)

Divide the dough into two batches, wrap one and place it in the freezer to be baked another time; wrap the other and place it in the freezer to chill until it is firm enough for making drop cookies. Don’t skip this step– even 30 minutes in the freezer really helps keep these cookies thick and chunky.

Preheat oven to 350F (176C).

Grab a spoonfuls of dough, mush them into something round-ish (don’t worry about making into an even ball) and drop onto the baking sheet. Bake 10 to 12 minutes until a delicate brown. Do not let the cookies get too brown.

Note

This recipe makes enough to keep half of the dough in the freezer. This can be great: my working mom and now I are able to make cookies on the fly for dinner parties or, you know, because it’s 3pm/9pm and we want cookies. But with great power comes great responsibility. This dough is criminally good, so refraining from polishing it off straight out of the freezer can be challenging. Good luck.