I have been trying to perfect my flapjack recipe.

The New Guy - my boss of about 2 years - is from England. Quick aside: he and I have rigged it so we have a weekly lunch meeting, and we trade off bringing lunch. He brings delicious sandwiches with exotic cheeses on wonderful hearty bread. They are always delicious and terrifically filling. For some reason, I have a deep, deep need to show off at these lunches; I am forever trying to impress him with my cooking.

Interestingly, I do not have such a deep need to impress him with my liturgist-ing. I mean, it's not that I'm slacking on my actual work - I just notice that the challenge of every-other-Wednesday-lunch does get me kind of excited. I'm sure that, eventually, I'll be flipping plain cheese sandwiches at him with a bored smirk, and he'll be just as gracious about that as he is about the spinach quiche and the fancy salad.

Anyway, I mention it because the flapjack craze around our house is his fault. (If 2007 was the Year of Poulet au vinagre, and it sure as hell was, 2008 may be the Year of Flapjack.) (If grocery prices remain as completely insane as they have been, it will certainly not be the year of any sort of meat dish, I can tell you that. Oatmeal remains cheap.)

Flapjack is a crunchy/chewy/sticky oatmeal bar cookie, made with butter, brown sugar and cane syrup. It's The New Guy's favorite sweet, and his daughters made some that he had brought in to share on a Wednesday. I made my first pan of flapjack that night.

(I'm not sure I'm using the word right, even. I'm pretty sure it's a mass noun, as opposed to American flapjacks, which I told Matthew was the cowboy word for pancake. Which would be a count noun, as in "Tex 'et 84 of them flapjacks.")

Anyway, you know how European recipes measure the ingredients in weights rather than volume? There are at least a hundred flapjack recipes on the internet, each one a little different, and apparently I would rather read them all than try to convert the measurements.

I keep trying them, and I keep messing them up. (It's a relative term. If you don't hate the mild molasses-y taste that the syrup adds, you really can't go too far wrong with a pan of butter, sugar and oatmeal.) Today's were the best so far - Ian begged for more! - but still not quite right. And a tiny bit burned.

But oatmeal is cheap, as I mentioned, so I do believe I will get this recipe right yet.