I was talking with a friend recently who mentioned a particular, ultra-delicious food item about which I hadn’t thought in a very long time: the Monster Cookie.

Back in the mid 1980s, as luck would have it, we each worked at a place that sold this impossibly soft, chewy, tasty cookie — she at the SuperDeli, myself a few doors down Monroe Avenue at the Circle K. Whereas I believe she enjoyed her work at the bar/eatery overall, I can safely say that the Monster Cookie was definitely the primary highlight of my tenure at the convenience store.

There was more than one kind of Monster Cookie, but so addicted was I to the oatmeal/chocolate chip variety — as was my friend — I honestly can’t tell you what the other types were.

As the name suggests, the cookies were big — the size of 4-5 regular cookies — and at both establishments, they were sold out of a big glass jar, hexagonal in shape if memory serves; no wrapper or anything, just a big container full of cookies that patrons, including employees, would help themselves to and then pay for.

Typically, I’d only eat half of one at a time — but sometimes, if I were really hungry and/or gluttonous, I would eat an entire one at once. Half or full, it was a highly enjoyable experience, one I repeated with as much regularity as I thought I could without turning into a tub of lard.

At some point after I (thankfully) left the Circle K, the cookies ended up being wrapped in cellophane, and they almost seemed a bit smaller then. Ultimately, they stopped becoming available at all, and I have not seen them in any form in more than a decade.

The consolation prize for me, though, is that shortly after I started working at the DH back in 1990, a woman in the business office shared an oatmeal cookie recipe that, no joke, produces cookies that taste almost exactly like the Monster Cookies. Myself, I can’t bake a lick — too lazy to try, mainly — but first my wife and then my daughter have taken it upon themselves to bake them for me with at least some regularity. And Pam, my daughter, even makes her cookies nice and big — not as large as Monster Cookies, but pretty good-sized, and just as tasty.

Still, if anyone else remembers Monster Cookies and knows what became of that company, I’d like to know; thanks to the bakers in my family, my appetite is satisfied, but my curiosity about the fate of the Monster Cookie firm isn’t.