When the snow came our lives turned inward. Even if I’d trusted the car drivers, the unploughed roads were too rough for my bicycle. The sidewalks were mostly un-shovelled and slow going. We were stuck. Clearing out the common rooms in our house felt like unraveling the homemaking of the past months. We stacked chairs, couch, chest, table together, emptied the bookshelf and cabinets and unscrewed them from the walls. The plants now crowded the dark, upstairs hallway. Books piled up under my bed and marched up the stair treads. Rolled carpets and table leaves leaned together in a closet.
The work was long and often tedious. Drywall, mudding, mudding, mudding, cutting trim to fit the crooked walls, blocking up the odd gaps, caulking and caulking and painting and painting. Every morning I pulled on the same faded black t-shirt with holes in the armpits, the same canvas pants with a utility knife and pencil in the side pocket. I lost track of the days. Today is the first of the new year. The house is still in chaos but a dank, cold wind no longer blows up through the gaps in the walls. There’s color now where there was once only contractor gray and peeling wallpaper. This isn't the decisive new beginning that a house restored to order would be but the yellow walls are a good start. Sophie Owner | Baker I watched the trees outside the window bend and sway as I stuffed my pannier with extra layers and water for the ride to the farm. It was my last delivery of the year. The wind had been blowing hard from the southeast all day. Just that morning the headwind had turned my southbound delivery route around the bay from an easy, flat ride into what felt like a five mile hill climb. Still, what was the point of an e-assist bicycle if not to assist with adverse conditions like these? I strapped the box of bread to the front deck, hung my pannier on the back rack, and rode out in defiance of the wind I rode through the city under fast, gray skies, through the forest with the treetops swaying and the breeze gentle around me. I wound the tight curves south of Larabee, bedrock rising to my left and falling away to my right, the sun breaking clear above the islands and glazing the water below shining white. I rode past water falling white and fast into culverts, past the mud streaks of small landslides, past rockfalls, past a giant cedar snag nose down beside the road, a long skid like a sled run streaking the hillside above it. The bare branches of the maples stood out bright against the firs. Madronas blazed up from the rock, red and yellow and shining green. Out from the protection of the hills the Skagit flats were as bad as I’d imagined. The wind picked up as the sun set, head on and getting colder. I distracted myself with birds. Red tail, red tail, starlings, red tail. Sea gulls floated in the flooded fields. A heron lifted off from just beside the road, awkward and startlingly large. Somewhere to my right I could hear geese—dozens? hundreds?—calling as they settled for the night. I was so tired I was blinking in and out of sleep even as my legs kept pumping. Five miles to go, and then two. I stopped to pull on another layer, heavier gloves, to drink water hoping it would wash the sleep from my eyes. Every mile was slower than the one before. I crossed the Samish and turned east. The wind punched me in the side and sent me wavering. I stared straight ahead at the road, at the dark clouds massed over the foothills. Pushed and pushed and I was at the farm. I abandoned the bike in the middle of the farm road and went straight inside. What was usually a ninety minute ride, motorless, had taken me nearly two and a half hours with the electric assist. E was gone on deliveries. I didn't care. I tore off a hunk of bread and spread it thick with butter. Ate it and I tore another, and two more after that. I finished the dried apricots in the tin above the sink. I boiled water and filled a mug, wrapped myself in a quilt, and drank it slowly. I was cold and exhausted and so grateful for walls and slippers, for the mug warming my hands, for stillness.
It was a good ride. Hard and good. I was glad for the ride and glad it was over, or I was glad for the year of baking and glad it was over, or I was just glad to be sitting down, warming up with the hot water and food. I was glad. And then I was asleep. Happy winter. Sophie Owner | Baker Thursday evening I turn down the oven on the rye bread, trade apron for sweater, and roll my bike out of the kitchen. Outside, the low sun sets the buildings and the bare branches of trees aglow. A maple burns red as an ember against the dark purple rain clouds. It’s sky drama worthy of a Renaissance painting. Not far from the kitchen is the last remnant of a 19th century orchard inside a 1970’s development. The development—aptly or ironically?— is named Orchard Terrace. There are only a handful of trees left now between the low brick condos. Most no longer bear fruit. My apple’s trunk is hollow and open on one side. Moss, ferns, and horny lichen grow from the old bark. Last year the groundskeeper threatened to cut the tree down, but in the end cut off only one of the two main branches. The remaining branch is heavy with fruit. The apples are russetted green-gold. They ripen late, bake well, and keep for months. When I walked over a week ago the fruit still clung firmly to the tree, flesh tart and juicy. Now it falls at a touch. When I bite into an apple I find it dry and sweet.
I walk to the nearest condo and tap on the screen. The door is open. Inside, a woman is sitting in a lounge chair watching TV. She turns to me without surprise. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. “Would you like the ladder?" Sophie Owner | Baker After weeks of sluggish dough and frustratingly long days in the bakery I finally realized the problem wasn't the cooling temperatures but my sourdough culture itself. At some point I must have let it get too hot or too cold or too acidic and the community of yeast and bacteria became unbalanced. I pulled my backup sourdough culture out of the fridge and added it to the mix, and voilà, this batch of bread rose beautifully and on schedule. If you bake your own sourdough bread, keep a little backup sourdough! You can start a new culture from flour and water in a week or two, but why wait if you don't have to? Cold and low water availability are two very good ways to slow down fermentation. I use both, taking a spoonful of ripe sourdough and mixing it with flour until its the texture of dry crumbs, then storing those crumbs in a jar in the fridge. Every 2-12 months (whenever I remember) I refresh the jar. But you can also keep a jar of wet sourdough in the fridge, protected by the a layer of alcoholic "hooch" that forms on top, or a ball of stiff sourdough buried in flour, or dried sourdough flakes at room temperature. There's no wrong way, as long as it works.
Sophie Owner | Baker Years ago a friend of a friend gave me a zine he'd written about climate change and culture. I still think about it often. In it he argues that our individual actions can be meaningful when they push cultural change. For example, if I plant a vegetable garden in my suburban back yard it serves my own pleasure, health, or home economics. A vegetable garden in the front yard, when the crabgrass stretches flat and green up and down the street, is about my own life and about changing or challenging the conversation in my community. The same, I think, can be true of buying local food, giving away wealth, traveling by bicycle or public transit, paying a living wage, and all the other counter-cultural choices, small and large, that we make in the course of our busy days.
There's a story I've been told my whole life--and one that I'm still trying to unlearn--about the value of private action and conscientious consumerism. It's a dangerous story because it's allowed me to feel like I was taking meaningful action by rejecting elements of consumer culture in my own life or business without doing the more difficult and uncomfortable work of challenging the culture around me. It's not that we shouldn't be putting up solar panels or getting rid of our cars--we should!--but that those choices need to be the start of the conversation, rather than the end. All the thought and money I put into making ethical choices for this tiny business are never going to have an impact unless I can make them in a public facing way that gets other people in my local or online community to think and talk and, perhaps, to make changes of their own. I need to plant my gardens on the street. Sophie Owner | Baker Last week I wrote about my years long search for a bakery space and my dream of a neighborhood bakery in the Fountain District. Writing stories is the best way I know to imagine the future. Not stories in numbers, not projected profit and loss or build-out budgets, though those are useful and necessary, but word stories. Here is a story of a walkable neighborhood bakery. On my task list for tomorrow is taking some quiet hours to write new bakery stories: a retail bakery downtown or east of the freeway; a wholesale bakery in an industrial park; a farmers market bakery that trades bicycles for trucks and sells down the I-5 corridor.
A Fountain District Bakery It’s raining again, a steady, cold drizzle, but inside the bakery is bright and warm. The walls are the colors of iron-rich earth: ochre, sienna, umber. The knotty pine of the front counter, the tables, and shelves glows dull yellow. The floor is scarred with age. The chairs don't match, nor do the sturdy, hand-thrown clay mugs. The air smells like bread and butter and the rosemary a boy is crushing between his fingers, pinched from one of the big terracotta pots by the front door. Behind the counter, yesterday's rye is stacked in long loaves above the slicer and scale and the wheat breads are cooling on the wood rack that half obscures the kitchen from the front. The pastries are lined up neatly behind a thick pane of glass that turns half of the front counter into a pastry case. The coffee carafe is full. At the narrow counter along the front windows, neighbors sit alone or in pairs with their coffee and morning pastry, watching the rain or the screens of their phones. Two families have claimed the long wood table, kids kneeling on the benches to reach for plates, their elbows bumping forgotten mugs of hot chocolate and each other. The line curves around the table to the door. We two early morning bakers are taking a break, drinking coffee and eating yesterday's apple tarts, sitting on the bench against the back office wall. Back here, too, is a mix-up of new and old: new vinyl floors, ugly but easy to clean, a new compressor in the old walk-in cooler, the sturdy old mixers, and the long, battered work bench I bought last year from a closing bakery, most of the scratches sanded out and its surface gleaming from a recent oiling. Next to the bench are dough tubs with the morning’s mix, stacked high on dollies. And at the heart of the kitchen our new oven, massive and beautiful, bright steel and the clear glass not yet clouded by smoke. We finish our breakfast just as the oven timer goes off. That’s one more batch of tarts for the hoard out front. While the dough rises, we pack up the morning’s orders on the two cargo bikes parked by the back rollup door, trade our sneakers for boots, layer up in wool and rain gear and ride out on morning deliveries. Sophie Owner | Baker I mix all the bread and pastry by hand, or, occasionally, with the dubious help of a home stand mixer. I’m good at mixing. My hands are paddles at the ends of my arms. My fingers squeeze. My back stays straight, my wrists rigid. I can mix hundreds of kilos without injury, week after week. I know the touch of every dough and batter intimately, all the way to my elbows. I like hand mixing the wheat doughs, judging their strength and hydration as I fold and squeeze. I don’t mind mixing the ryes, though they’re so sticky I have to scrape them off my arms and from between my fingers with a plastic rib and then scrub with the rough side of the dish sponge. Only the chocolate chip cookie dough truly makes me wish for a mechanical mixer. It’s thick and inelastic and I jam my fingers on chocolate disks. The thing is, I have a mechanical mixer. Soon I’ll have two! I just need to build a bakery to put them in. There’s an old workhorse of a Kemper spiral mixer that I picked up from a closing bakery packed away in E’s barn because it’s too big for the restaurant kitchen where I bake. And even now a Hobart planetary mixer, fully refurbished and painted a brilliant blue, is getting packed on a pallet to be shipped west. Where I’ll put it I don’t yet know. I’ve been watching the Fountain District, my favorite of the commercial districts and the only one in central Bellingham without a bakery, for three years, hoping to find a space. So far nothing, or at least nothing that could be built out on any kind of sane budget, has opened up. So I’ll look towards Sunnyland, towards the CBD, towards Sehome or Roosevelt, towards the industrial parks at the edges of town. Retail bakery, wholesale bakery, commissary kitchen? I’ve written the story of a neighborhood bakery/cafe in the Fountain District so many times I know it by heart; it’s time to revise the plot, or perhaps rewrite it entirely. If nothing else, I need a place to put these large and lovely machines.
Sophie Owner | Baker The earth moves more quickly at the equinox, or at least it feels that way as we tilt towards winter. Each day is shorter, the light cooler, the night colder. The other morning I woke to blue skies and rode out into a bank of fog that capped the hill and pooled in the hollow of downtown, leaving our house bare in the pale sunshine.
It’s a lovely morning. Over the traffic roar and refrigerator hum I can hear a chickadee whistling in the back yard (are our ears tuned particularly to birdsong, to pull their frequencies out from all the human clatter?). Yesterday’s bake went beautifully, mostly. The rye breads—all three kinds! Mountain, Vollkorn, and Ring—rose well; the wheat loaves bloomed; the cookies are crisp; the plum scones tender; the apple cake as perfect a fall pastry as I’ve yet baked with its sweet-tart fruit, earthy buckwheat and rye, and hint of warm spice. Only the gingerbread went awry, collapsing as it cooled. I’m not sure I have the patience to nurse this temperamental cake through another season. Delicious as it is, it may be time to retire it in favor of a less fragile recipe. Ezra’s setting up the stand as I write. I’m off to ride the morning’s deliveries and then I’ll circle back to the Depot. It’s been a long time since I spent a full day at market, wallowing as I’ve been the luxury of two day weekends. I’ll see you there. Sophie Owner | Baker The figs are done, the blackberries sour with rain and cool weather. But the prune plums are ripe, purple skins dusted with yeast and insides a delightful, juicy yellow. I’ve been running our dehydrator for a week drying down my first harvest, one batch after another. The early saucing apples are near their end, the denser fall apples starting to sweeten. I’ve seen pears beginning to drop on my rides through the city and grapes darkening with color. This is the most bountiful time of year for a gleaner. In city parks, alleys, the edges of parking lots and along parking strips, in private gardens, there’s fruit ripening. Everywhere, fruit. Don’t be afraid to knock on your neighbors' doors and ask to scramble up their trees. The worst that will happen is baffled rejection. The best, a winter larder stocked with sunshine.
This week’s snack cake is made with our Gravensteins and an earthy mix of buckwheat and rye. The oat scones are contrasting tender, sweet pastry with tart, juicy plums. There’s an apple rye bread coming up in the Fall Bread Subscription and I’ve been wondering about grape pastries. Soon it will be time for gingerbread cake. I’ve put up ten gallons of apple sauce so far in preparation. And now it's time to make toast and perhaps one last cup of coffee, pack up my panniers, and ride home from the farm before Chuckanut gets too busy. I'll see you at market in a few hours! Sophie Owner | Baker There’s a crab spider in the echinacea, sucking a syrphid dry. Last night my headlamp caught the gleaming black backs of beetles eating something I’d rather not step in. The other morning I picked up an apple and found a tree frog clinging to its curve, heart beat in its throat, copper back bright as a penny. A skunk lives under the back shed. Since we cut the long grass the doe no longer beds down here, but she still wanders through to browse the unprotected tomatoes and young apple trees. I’ll spend most of the day pruning the dead wood out of these long-neglected fruit trees and thinking about the habitats we might plant for all our creatures, great and small and humans included, if we can successfully beat back the blackberry and the English ivy, keep the bindweed, tansy, thistle, lesser celandine, and yellow archangel under tight control. If you have expertise, advice, or book recommendations on landscaping for biodiversity, we’d welcome them, because although this plot we bought at the edge of town is now ours to steward, it’s home to many and could have space for many more. Ezra will be at the market stand from 10-2 and the bread this week is truly beautiful. Every fermentation yesterday was right on point, from buckwheat to wheat to rye. The plum cake is as much plum as cake. The berry scones have the last blackberry harvest of the year, picked from that very blackberry hedge at the foot of our garden that I’m aiming to eradicate. The cookies are crisp and buttery, just the way we like them.
Sophie Owner | Baker |
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