kids, do NOT try this at home.

Last week I informed Charles that I wanted to be a gourmet chef, and he reminded me that I had not yet conquered creme brulee. They don't let you become gourmet until you do that. So we got to it. We decided on the barefoot Contessa's recipe for it, since it involved oranges (well, orange liqueur. for which we substituted orange extract.) and we got started. Everything was going really well at first. This is before we put them in the oven.

Kinda cute, huh? That's what we thought. We put them in the oven for forty-five minutes like the recipe said, and when they came out they filled the kitchen with a creamy, tangy, orangey smell and they looked exactly like they were supposed to look. It wasn't until the actual bruleeing part that things got interesting, though. We don't actually have a brulee torch, as I'm sure most young newlyweds can identify with, so we had to be a little more creative.

Charles used a 3M can of air (like for dusting computers) and a candle lighter to create a makeshift torch and brulee the sugar on top to make it carmalized and crunchy. Kind of exciting, eh? Here's what it looked like when he was done with the bruleeing.

It made a very satisfying cracking sound when you hit it with a spoon (0r a fork, for those of us who are spoon-wary) and it was so sweet and custardy! We were standing and eating one, and giggling, when we realized that we were a little too giggly. We opened the window and went to the living room, but even that wasn't enough to escape the fumes we'd inadvertently created with our silly torch. So we opened all the windows in the house, went outside for a walk, and finally decided to call the poison control center because we didn't feel too hot. 411 and the provo police department both gave us the wrong number for the poison control center at first, which is a little disconcerting, but we finally got through and we made friends with a woman named Sandy who didn't really believe us when we told her we weren't huffing the 3M air can, but trying to be gourmet chefs with it. Anyway, she finally told us we'd be fine, but we shouldn't go back inside for awhile. So we walked around in the cold night and went to 7-11 and basically felt very silly and foolish. But we were glad to have created another funny memory to look back on, when we're old and wrinkled and too senile to be trusted with brulee torches. Sandy even called us back an hour later to check on us and tell us we were goofy. Thanks, Sandy!

This week we're trying duck a l'orange and chocolate souffle!