Quaker Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

I'm sure some people have cookies for breakfast, but that may not have been what The Quaker Oats Company intended when it came out with Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies. I saw the product being demonstrated at Wal-Mart, and I was curious. Could the company that is famous for making a popular breakfast staple actually make a good (and possibly equally popular) chocolate chip cookie?

I was now curious, and my curiosity forced me to buy a package of those cookies, because the product demonstrator was on her lunch hour when I saw the display. It was not much of a risk though, because at $2.18 for seven inner packages, it seemed like a reasonable price, even if I ended up disappointed.

Like many products on store shelves today, there is a lot of packaging for this product. Not surprisingly, this product seemed to be packaged like granola bars.

The outer box is colorful cardboard with blue and oatmeal being the dominant colors and takes up a 6X10 inch space. Inside the box are seven smaller packages, similarly colorfully wrapped in a way that makes it looks like it comes from a vending machine. I was surprised by how small these packages were at about 2.5 X 5 inches. I was even more surprised when I read that there were four cookies in each of those packs. The cookies measured about 2 inches X 2 inches round. Indeed these cookies did not appear to be the same as the one's sold at Subway for example. I was indeed amazed that the contents of the packages kept getting smaller and smaller.

I know what a bowl of oatmeal tastes like, since I have it for breakfast one or more times a week.

I have tasted oatmeal cookies before, and my favorite ones are the ones my grandmother baked, and which fortunately, other generations in my family have successfully been able to replicate. They are called oatmeal lace, and seriously, they are as sweet as candy. :-)

I also know what a chocolate chip cookie tastes like, though the taste and textures vary greatly. There is my Mother's version of the Nestle Toll-House recipe, which will always be my favorite, many different bakery versions of chocolate chip cookies, and there are mass produced chocolate chip cookies, such as Chips Ahoy. I truly expected these cookies to taste identical to a Chips Ahoy cookie, just with different packaging.

The resulting taste and experience: None of the above!

The first thing I noticed was the fact that while there was an adequate amount of chocolate chips per cookie, it was not overwhelming, in that it would drown out any other aspect of the cookie. In that way, it was very different from the Chips Ahoy cookie. The cookie was also adequately sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, like my Grandmother's oatmeal lace cookies. They seemed a little bland when compared with Chips Ahoy, but the experience was not unpleasant at all. One thing I was a little disappointed in, was the fact that they seemed a bit dry. I know most cookies are hard and not soft, but these were drier than any I've ever tasted. (Not to be confused with hardness.) I wonder if that has something to do with the characteristics of whole grain oat flour, the main ingredient. (I have a recipe for sloppy joes which calls for oatmeal, and that serves to absorb some excess liquid from the beef and other ingredients.)

The good part about having a relatively dry cookie, like these or Lorna Dunes or any shortbread cookie, is that it makes you want to drink something with it. I would recommend coffee, tea, milk or water with these, but nothing with alcohol, even if it tastes good to you. The alcohol would only dehydrate more than the cookies themselves.

If you decide to buy these cookies, I would not hoard them if I were you. The carton I bought has a "best before" date of just 31 days from when I bought it.

While they are good, I was not tempted to eat more than one package at a time.

Since they are in individual packages, they would be good to use as snacks or to give out at Halloween.

Probably the best part of these cookies is that, as a snack, they are not all that bad for you. Fats, carbohydrates and sodium are not too high for a snack food, and they do have 2 grams of fiber or 8% of your daily recommended intake.