Brûlée

A pair of french experiences:

I played guitar for our local church service last Sunday.  It was a mix of Francophone songs as well as English songs translated into French.  And as in all cultures of the world that I have experienced, they seemed to like their translation of "Shine Jesus Shine" quite a bit.  I understood some of the words and was particularly struck by the line in the chorus "brûler, Esprit, brûler", which is the translation of "Blaze, Spirit, Blaze".  Where have I seen that word before?

The prior Tuesday our family went shopping at the local Lidl store, which is within a 20 minute walk from our house, and is akin to its European cousin, Aldi.  It's fun to search around and see what you find.  Perhaps the best find of that trip was this:

That's right.  Crème brûlée for home consumption, for use "avec au sans" the acetylene torch.  These two little desserts were sold for a grand total of 1.29 euros.  They came in their own glass ramekins (I guess you can't torch plastic), and each with their own little sachet of sugar.  We were excited.

Next challenge, our oven has two knobs, and this took us a little bit of work.  The settings are #1-9, and (as we have learned) the timer has to be on in order for the oven to kick in.  The French instructions seemed to be asking us to "brûlée" the oven, which probably meant broil, but maybe just cook.

The result is here.  It didn't have the burned class of a true crème brûlée, but that may have just been as a result of us not broiling, or maybe not cooking it long enough.  Oh well, it was truly tasty, and now we have two little glass ramekins on our shelves.