Riding down alleys and along side streets, cutting across parking lots and over sidewalks, I learn the city's bounty. All year I scout the possibilities along my bicycle lines, and come summer, I'm knocking on doors and scrambling up trees, chasing the harvest. The unfortunate but useful truth is that most people have no knowledge of or interest in food preservation. Even a dwarf tree can produce more fruit than a family can eat out of hand, without the season extending help of canning, drying, freezing, or pressing into cider. Perhaps they take a bowl of cherries to the office, or make a few apple pies, but most of the harvest is left to fall. As the year turns, the sidewalks and alleys are smeared with plums and bruised apples; figs split open in the sun, swarming with wasps; squirrels secret away the green nuts. These streets hold such an uncelebrated abundance. There are the unharvested trees in people’s yards, of course, but also the last remnants of century-old orchards in the forgotten corners of housing developments and in city parks, fruit trees planted into the landscaping along parking strips, and thorny banks of Himalayan blackberries overrunning every open and disturbed piece of ground. There is enough here to fill a pantry, and I do: apples pressed into cider and cooked into sauce, plums and figs dried, pears poached and tucked into jars, quince slow-roasted to jewel-toned membrillo. The task of saving a city’s worth of fruit is overwhelming and, of course, impossible, but still, each year I try, loading the back of my bicycle with boxes of sticky gleanings and staying up late into the night, saving the season. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Apple Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Honey Labneh + Peach Tart Savory Plum Tart Plum Anise Torte Shorties & Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Cinnamon Raisin Mountain Rye Cookies I will be MISSING SATURDAY MARKET next weekend, July 29, to attend the Grain Gathering. You can order MOUNTAIN RYE, RED & WHITE, CINNAMON RAISIN, or COOKIES for Wednesday pickup at Cafe Velo between 8 am and 7 pm, or at the Fairhaven Farmers Market between 12 pm and 5 pm HERE or in person today at the market. Orders are due by 8 am Monday morning. See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: OVERHEARD
(I’m introducing a new postscript to my weekly newsletter with the best of what I’ve read or listened to in the past week(ish). As with most of what I write here, this is only tangentially connected to baking, in that I listen to dozens of hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week to turn off the anxiety-inducing white roar of the commissary kitchen, and for the pure pleasure of having someone tell me stories.) As the last chapter of When Breath Becomes Air came to a close, I stepped out of the book's hold to realize I’d been standing still in the center of an empty kitchen, mop and dishes forgotten, listening with my whole body. I was crying, and grateful that no one else was there to witness my inexplicable emotion. Paul Kalanithi's memoir at the moment defies my search for adjectives, but the last book that so thoroughly broke my heart, and then put it back together, was Mark Doty’s memoir Heaven’s Coast. Reading those two devastating memoirs in succession might be too much. Better to pair Kalanithi with the pragmatic hope of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal for a powerful exploration of death and medicine. I rode home from the kitchen last night chasing the edge of light. In front of me was a stripe of fading orange sky and the clouds were top lit, though their bellies were heavy with night. Behind me the clouds marched off in orderly rows into the dark. I felt like I might catch the sun, if only I rode a little faster. I was so busy looking up I nearly ran into the curb. Clouds can be dangerous that way. Today the sky is bright and empty, so perhaps I'll manage to keep my eyes on the road. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Country Rye with brotgewürz, apples, and whey Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Raspberry Lebni Tart Cardamom Roll Garden Pesto Twist Brown Butter Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Mountain Rye Various Sweets See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker Before Raven Breads, there was relatively little of me, Sophie Williams, on the internet. A smattering of archived high school sports stats (none particularly impressive), my undergraduate thesis (prairie soil recovery from monocropping, results insignificant), some pictures with friends on Facebook, and... that was about it. Well, that and whatever cyber-tracks I left behind me as I bumbled, heedless, through the web. But Raven Breads was different than anything I had done before. It was mine. And without consciously deciding to do so, I threw my inner self into the business alongside my outer. What does it mean, now, to have so much of myself laid out on the open net? This is not a rhetorical question: I am curious, if still less concerned than perhaps I should be. It is not so much the lack of personal privacy that bothers me, though I am startled when relative strangers ask me, offhand, about my inner thoughts and fears, but after listening yesterday to an interview with the founder of the Library Freedom Project, I wonder if I have, all unthinking, and likely alongside millions of others, given away too much to the dark mind. (What does one call the private deep state without sounding like a conspiracy nut? Can one even be a conspiracy nut, given the stranger-than-fiction realities of our Orwellian world?). It is time, I suppose, to go online and start reading up on cybersecurity and democracy (oh, the irony!). But first, I have a farmers market to attend! Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Strawberry Rhubarb Galette Garden Pesto Twist Croissant (exploded) Granola Wednesday Market Polenta Mountain Rye various pastries See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker If I were a painter, I would paint the sky. I would paint the white edge of dawn, and then the wisp of cirrus across a pale summer morning. I would paint the racing altocumulus, the delicate scud of cirrocumulus, the cumulonimubus sailing like naval fleets across the prairie. In the winter, I would paint a thousand gentle grays. Gray-yellow. Gray-purple. Gray-green. Even the heavy nimbostratus would hold wonder. I would go to the desert and for a year paint nothing but the deep blue bowl above me. Blue, that series would be called, and it would redefine my understanding of the color. And I would paint the night sky, of course. I would paint the edge of a summer night fading pale green to dusty orange, and Venus flirting with the crescent moon against the darkening ómbre. I would lay back in a mountain meadow, high in the clear blue air, and paint the wheeling stars, one by one, as they spun above me. As I spun below them. As we spun together. Oh, but I miss the sky. Perhaps because I am so much a creature of the earth—steady and solid—it is not the dirt I ache for these long days baking in the fluorescent box of the kitchen, but the sky. Being cut off from the light and air and weather is like being lost from the world. Someday, when (if) I have my own bakery, I will have big windows. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame & Fennel Palmier Strawberry Rhubarb Roll Garden Pesto Twist Croissant Granola Wednesday Market Country Rye & Mountain Rye Pastries See you soon!
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