I’m known in some parts as the cookie monster. It’s a fair moniker.

I love cookies.

If I have cookies available, I cannot stop eating them.

This means that when cookies are available, I eat them all—and then, because I have this problem, I do not make them available again for a good long while. (Dangerous!)

However, despite my love for cookies, I’d always been disappointed by the chocolate-chip cookies I made myself. They just seemed sad, somehow. Never the right mixture of gooey-chewy on the inside and crispy on the outside. Never the right depth and fluff and variety of texture.

Just sort of… basic.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d still eat ‘em. But they never came close to the majesty of a good, gourmet chocolate chip cookie I could only get at a quality bakery that knows its chocolate-chip cookies. (Note: Even good bakeries do not always know their chocolate chip cookies.)

Then, desperate for chocolate chip cookies in a place that doesn’t even have good bakeries offering them (because no one knows cookies in Europe), I gave a go to a recipe I found in the now out-of-print 2008 cookbook The Bon Appetit Fast Easy Fresh Cookbook, by Barbara Fairchild.

And they were vastly better than any cookie I’d ever made myself.

Yet!

I thought I could perhaps tweak and play just a tiny bit to see if I could make them even better.

And voilà: My now absolutely all-time favorite, will-eat-the-entire-batch-in-an-afternoon, go-to homemade chocolate chip cookie. It far outshines anything I’d ever before or since had in a homemade chocolate chip cookie (made by myself or anyone else).

Once upon a time, in talking cookies (as one does), someone asked me to share this recipe. I realized that I really should—but it was handwritten, I’d need to type it up, and so on. So I never did.

I don’t even remember now who’d asked for it. Shamefully. In hopes that the person will happen upon this post somehow, in love and goodwill to my readers, and with the universal goal to spread the yumminess, I thought I’d offer my chocolate chip recipe as a gift to you, dear fellow cookie lover.

Side note: As I am anything but a chef or baker—notice I only got to this recipe because I couldn’t find a good cookie to purchase—this may be the only recipe I’ll ever have to share. I cook and bake to eat, utilitarian-style, more than I cook or bake for pleasure.

THE NO-CONTEST BEST HOMEMADE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

INGREDIENTS:

• Old fashioned oats: 210-220 grams

• All-purpose flour: 220 grams

• Baking soda: 1 teaspoon

• Salt: ½ teaspoon

• Salted butter: 110-115 grams

• Dark brown sugar: 230 grams (see important note below)

• Sugar: 105 grams

• Eggs: 2

• Vanilla extract: 1 teaspoon

• Walnuts (or pecans or a mix): 150 grams

• Dark baking chocolate (80 percent chocolate): 325-330 grams

Important note: Brown sugar in the United States is a specific product not sold in most places outside of the country. If you cannot get U.S. brown sugar, you can make your own brown sugar with white granulated sugar and molasses. This extra step is worth the effort, because anything you find marketed as “brown sugar” elsewhere is not the same thing and will not give you the same results.

STEP-BY-STEP TO PERFECTION:

OVEN TEMPERATURE: 375 Fahrenheit / 190 Celsius

1. Remove the butter from the refrigerator and set it aside to soften.

2. Roughly chop the dark baking chocolate into chunks.

3. Roughly chop the nuts.

4. In a small bowl, combine the dark chocolate and the nuts and set aside.

5. Finely grind the oats in a food processor.

6. To the oats in the food processor, add the flour, baking soda, and salt.

7. Blend these ingredients together for a few seconds.

8. In a large bowl, beat the butter, sugar, and brown sugar.

9. To the bowl, add the eggs and vanilla.

10. In the bowl, beat together all the ingredients until well incorporated.

11. To the bowl, add the contents of the food processor.

12. In the bowl, fold together the ingredients until blended.

13. To the bowl, add the nuts and the chunks of chocolate. Fold them into the dough.

14. Scoop an egg-sized mound of dough, form it into a ball, and place it onto an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat until all dough is formed into balls.

15. Bake for approximately 12-15 minutes, until the cookies are golden brown on the edges and tops.

16. Cool the cookies on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes.

17. Remove the cookies from the cookie sheets to a rack finish cooling—if you and your crew don’t simply just eat them all from the sheet, still warm.

If you give these a try, I’d love to hear what you think!