Cookie tales

I'm not really much of a treats person. That's not to say I don't like treats, but rather that I don't tend to eat them very often. Which, let's face it, is a crying shame.

Well, okay. Let me rephrase: By "not very often" I mean, "not every day." And by "not every day" I mean that there is at least one treat that I enjoy at the very least on a weekly basis.

And that treat, my friends, is a cookie.

Not just any cookie, but a huge cookie. A huge, thick, semidry, jaw-straining oatmeal raisin cookie, courtesy of Breezy Hill Orchard and Cider Mill, via the Union Square Greenmarket.

This is a sink-your-teeth-in kind of baked good: It gives your chompers a run for their money, which is just how I like my baked goods to be. It's almost the texture of a very dense protein bar. (Which is not to imply that I fool myself into thinking it's a "healthy" cookie. A cookie's a cookie, man -- even if it does happen to be a workout for your molars.)

And because it's sweetened with apple sauce instead of sugar, it isn't at all cloying. In fact, it's much more oaty and cinnamony than anything else, though the raisins get terrifically juicy and tend to pop like little bursts of jelly candy when bitten into.

It's become my Saturday-morning ritual to walk the dog out Greenmarket way on the hunt for one of these baked forces of nature. Though Breezy Hill is at the market other days of the week, something about a molar-challenging oatmeal-raisin cookie just screams "Let's start this weekend!" to me for some reason, so I refrain from workweek indulgences on the things.

It ain't easy, let me tell you. I seriously love these delicious little hockey-puck-esque things. It's inexplicable!

Now all I have to do is learn how to re-create them. Then we'd be getting into some trouble, people.

Do you have a regular favorite treat? (Hopefully, unlike me, you don't have to wait for a particular day of the week to enjoy it…)