The Garden Interior

This is a summary of today’s post .

• We had a flurry of last minute preparations and more than a flurry of snow, as the great day arrives. At The Garden Interior, we are besotted with the joy of the season, returning family members, and wonderful food and drink on all sides. To make the season even more special we give two of our family’s holiday traditions, a spectacular Christmas Stollen and an cgg and cheddar soufflé for Christmas morning.
• Also, please check out the photos posted under the button on the right (“Weekly Garden Photos”), for some new and beautiful pictures of what is going on in the garden in late autumn.  Though the year is drawing to a close, the garden is still OPEN, so please come in!
• And in the “Book Reviews” section (button on right), we are reviewing Writing the Garden , by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. She was the main founder of the Central Park Conservancy in New York City and now she has produced this volume, subtitled “A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries”, which has rightly won the prestigious American Horticultural Society Book Award. It fluently but never frivolously discusses the garden writing of more than three dozen great writers, sampling their work and presenting it in a superbly enlightening context.
• Has any of your friends been turned into a statue?  No?  One of mine has and today I am reminiscing about that (hint: he was an astronaut) and about how great it is to be headed home for Christmas after a long year of business travel.  There are four personal and sentimental vignettes that I think you will like: Jerusalem, Munich, Madrid and the Amazon.  Please check it out today, to the right of this post, under the button “Personal snapshot: I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

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It was a very White Christmas after all. It started snowing hard on Christmas Eve and went on all day and night, dropping nearly two feet of the stuff, the heaviest snow since we have lived here. I wrapped the last presents like mad, worrying about my wife out in the blizzard, buying them faster than I could wrap them, but somehow, it all came together as it always does. That is a minor Christmas miracle in itself. On Christmas Eve, we opened a few presents and had cheese fondue in the reading room, followed by a disk of video from Christmases when our children were small. Tears of laughter all round. Then chocolate fondue in the reading room for dessert, and then we all fell into bed rather late.

On the great day, I was up at 7:30, baked a Christmas Stollen and put a kringle in the oven to warm, treasured Scandinavian traditions from my childhood, and eventually everyone else got up, and we started in on the presents. Then we had our favorite Christmas egg casserole. Kids (younger kids) like to help with the Stollen, but make this before Christmas Day, as it is much too involved (as I discovered) for the great day itself; and you can make the egg soufflé the night before too.

Christmas Stollen

5½ cups flour (more if the dough is sticky and too like cookie dough)

4 tsp. baking powder

1½ cups sugar

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. mace

1 tsp. ground cardamom

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg

8-10 oz. slivered almonds, toasted and ground

1½ sticks unsalted butter

16 oz. softened cream cheese

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. almond extract

50 ml cognac (the size of an airplane bottle)

½ cup currants

½ cup golden raisins

½ cup dried cherries, chopped

½ cup dried pineapple, chopped

The peel of one lemon (not the white part), chopped fine

2 7-oz. tubes of almond paste (marzipan)

One tube of any cookie icing for decorating

Let the cream cheese and butter come to room temperature and put to one side. Then sift together the dry ingredients in the first group. Add the almonds, then cut in the butter with a pastry knife until the mixture resembles coarse sand.

In a blender, cream together the ingredients in the second group. Pour this into a bowl and stir in the dried fruit. Gradually add the wet mixture to the dry mixture until everything is well blended.

Work the dough into a ball and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead it for a few minutes, just until the dough is smooth and elastic. Divide the dough into two halves. Shape one half of it into an oval about ten inches long and eight inches wide and about one inch thick. With the edge of a blunt butter knife, crease it lengthwise, just off-center. Roll out one of the tubes of almond paste to a little smaller than the crease, then lay the rolled-out almond paste on top of the larger half of the Stollen, next to the crease. Fold the smaller side of the Stollen over the larger side and place it on a greased baking sheet. The traditional idea, you see, is that the folded, lumpy bread resembles the bundle of the infant Jesus.

Brush it lightly with melted butter before baking. Repeat for the second loaf. Makes two large loaves or four small ones. Bake at 350 for about 50-55 minutes. If it gets too brown, cover it with aluminum foil. Allow to cool before decorating it with the cookie icing. The loaves can be prepared in advance and then frozen, to be cooked later. One way to serve the bread is toasted with vanilla ice cream; then you can go completely off the deep end (it is Christmas, after all) by pairing it with a glass of Madeira from V. Sattui in the Napa Valley. Oh. My. God.

Christmas Egg and Cheddar Soufflé

1 lb. grated white cheddar

½ lb. sausage, cooked and drained

½ lb. good quality bacon, cooked and drained

Half a baguette of bread, cubed

9 eggs, beaten

3 cups whole milk

1 tsp. salt

1½ tsp. dry mustard

Spread the first four ingredients in a greased 9×13 baking dish. Pour the next four ingredients on top and refrigerate overnight. Bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes and allow to rest ten minutes before serving. Serves 6-8.

And then we left the kitchen in a mess and hurried off to noon Mass. Afterwards, I took Cosimo for a long Christmas walk around a pond not far from our house. It is a bit warmer today, though there is still a lot of snow on the ground, and the only color in the landscape (other than the cheerful Christmas lights everywhere) is the startling red of the holly berries and an occasional fly-by of our pair of cardinals. Which reminds me that, as we were lying in bad last night and falling asleep with the fire flickering in our bedroom, we could hear our vigilant neighborhood owl outside, hooting a friendly Merry Christmas to all.