Week 250: Making Bread Before Sunrise
Short one this week, for a couple obvious reasons.
As I'm writing this, my wife has just rolled out of here before sunrise on Christmas Eve, not to see a patient, but to see my mother. My mother has a couple of December rituals, one is the baking of cookies, which takes up a few days of work and includes some of the recipes of her mother, and probably before that. We pitch in, the early Christmas pictures of me are of me in double leg casts stretched out over the kitchen counter decorating a tray of sugar cookies. The roles have changed, Catie took over decoration at age 8 and I now handle the stove. But it's a weekend tradition that we've managed to transfer over and train people for the Christmases to come.
The remaining big baking recipe that prompted the early rising. After years of my wife wanting to get the recipe, my mother is letting her help mix up the stollen. Stollen is a German Christmas Bread, a tradition of my family's Pennsylvania Dutch line. It's a long loaf of yeast dough with candied fruit and nuts embedded in it and glazed with a sugar icing. It's basically a fruitcake you can eat for breakfast that will survive a toaster oven. And it, combined with a broiled grapefruit, is why the tradition here is Christmas Breakfast rather than dinner.
We try and learn things where we can. Dana has wanted to learn it from my mother for years, but she's always been out of town or working when the loaves are made. Finally this year, we were able to get her free when the dough was being prepped, though it involved getting everyone together for Christmas Eve Eve Pizza so schedules could be coordinated. Tomorrow, yesterday when this is read, we're springing my father from the hospital not for dinner, but for breakfast so he can get his annual grapefruit and stollen. We'll see how he does, if it doesn't exhaust him he may stay for dinner and dessert.
The other reason for my revamp of this week: late in the afternoon Friday I had the word come down. We're scheduled for the show. January 15. Perfect placement to find out, just minutes before the end of the last school day of the year. So I barely had time to let Mrs. Parker know before vacation, and barely had time to put a message out to the team. And due to out change of schedule, we'll have our first practice... January 9. Back to the book's original premise. And probably no time for crystal radio projects this week.