Lately, I can’t get enough of these:

I’m obsessed.

I discovered Tazo’s iced tea at Starbucks. I never buy coffee at Starbucks. I’ve tried. You know I love strong coffee and my favorite is Peet’s French Roast. Starbucks makes their coffee way too strong for this coffee lover and it has a somewhat bitter taste. But I do stop in at the mini-Starbucks when I’m at my neighborhood Target and get a little Tazo Passion flavored iced tea for the trip home. It’s so good!

On a Target shopping trip, I noticed a box of the same tea and it magically jumped in my cart. Now I can have my very own glass of iced tea here at the cottage.

But the big obsession, my downfall, my craving, is this box of cookies.

I’ve never liked Oreos. I don’t like the taste of the chocolate they use. I don’t particularly like the creme center. They taste fakey and too sugary to me. I’ve tried. They have not passed the Claudia taste test. I have strict rules, you know.

When I was a young girl, my mom would occasionally buy chocolate creme cookies. I can’t remember what company made them, but they were far and away my favorite cookies to munch on. As I helped her unload groceries, I crossed my fingers that somewhere in one of those bags was a box of chocolate cremes. Just for me. Well, I suppose I had to share them with the rest of the family. I couldn’t secretly hide them in my bedroom, could I? I wouldn’t stoop that low….

Fast forward many years. Many years. Every once in a while, I would scan the cookie shelves in the grocery store, hoping against hope that something other than Oreos or any of the other standard sandwich cookies would appear. Nothing. Until recently…..

I was at our local store, in the darned cookie/cracker aisle (I’m also addicted to Stoned Wheat Thins) and I glanced at the section with specialty cookies, which often seem to be made in another country. The still-hopeful-after-all-these-years-dream of a chocolate creme cookie in my head, I did a quick scan. Double take. Rubbing of eyes. Did I read that label correctly? Afraid I was seeing things, I grabbed a box like the one in the photo. Chocolate cremes. Made by Dare, which is a Canadian company. Hey, my mom is Canadian, 3 out of 4 of my grandparents were Canadian – I felt it was my duty to give them a try. I must be true to my heritage. So I bought one box.

EXACTLY like the cookies of my youth. You have no idea how excited this made me. I couldn’t stop yammering about them. I made Don try them. (He likes them a lot. Darn. Refer back to sharing issues mentioned in paragraph 6.) I ate approximately 6 or 7 or 8 of them. Believe me, I could eat more than that in one fell swoop.

Since then, I buy two boxes at a time. When they are out of stock, my heart sinks. Clearly, I’m not the only local shopper who loves these. Sometimes I am forced to substitute Dare’s Lemon Creme cookies (which are quite tasty.) I have yet to try their Maple Creme cookies, but I’m sure I will succumb at some future date. But these smooth, velvety chocolate cremes are my achilles heel. They are a happy connection to my childhood. They are scrumptious.

I need to make sure that my local store never stops stocking these. Or heads are going to roll.

I mean it.

Happy Tuesday.