This has been a good year. The business continues to grow, despite my failure to hustle, which means I've gotten to feed more people the food that I love. I've made dear new friends and deepened old friendships. I've found time for books and learning, time for powerful conversations, time to live inside my body, time for wild places and for wonder.

This has been a hard year. Finding balance between work, community, and my personal life is a constant challenge, and one that has, this year, sent me sliding dangerously close to burnout. My climate grief is a steady ache; thinking about the future, about the world our insatiable hunger is making, fills me with sorrow and fear. Deafened by the drumbeat of suffering and greed in the daily news cycle, I stopped reading the newspaper entirely and retreated to longform journalism and books.

In thanks for the good things the year has brought, in celebration of the close of another season, and in acknowledgment of all the times, tired or distracted by work, I failed to show up for our community, I'll be donating 10% of retail sales this month to organizations working for social and environmental justice. I have a handful of projects in mind, but if you have suggestions, especially for organizations working at the intersection of food and justice, I'd like to hear them.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

There are only three more markets this year! The last is the Saturday before Christmas. We'll be closed from Dec 22 until the Winter Bread Subscription starts up on Jan 22. Place orders ONLINE with a credit card or at MARKET with cash or check.

HOLIDAY SWEETS
(Preorder for pickup at the last market, Dec 21)

Gingerbread Bundt
Chocolate Babka
Pain d'Epices (made with honey, rye, and spices, mixed and aged for 18 months!! to deep, sweet complexity.)
Hazelnut & Oat Snowballs (inspired by all the books I've been reading recently about rambling through the British countryside.)
Plus Malted Chocolate Chip, Bittersweet Chocolate, Gingersnap, and Shortbread Cookies.

FILL YOUR PANTRY!
(Preorder whole loaves for pickup at the last market, Dec 21)

Red & White (1.5 kg)
Mountain Rye (2.3 kg)
Vollkornbrot (2.3 kg)
Seedy Buckwheat (1.3 kg)

WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
Every Wednesday for 10 weeks, Jan 22 - March 25
Pickup in Birchwood, Downtown, or in Fairhaven

RED & WHITE subscription ($70)
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($70)
BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($80)

BAKER's CHOICE menu: all rye all winter long!
Jan 22: Rugbrod
Jan 29: Ring Rye
Feb 5: Apple Rye
Feb 12: Harvest Miche 1
Feb 19: Harvest Miche 2
Feb 26: Black Bread
March 4: Alpine Spice Rye
March 11: Rye & Oat
March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye??
March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel!

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat
Black Bread (limited)

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap Cookie
Hazelnut Snowballs (limited)
Apple Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps
Pain d'Epices (test bake)

We will NOT BE AT MARKET today.

Order Mountain Rye, Red & White, or Baker's Choice  (this week it's a Finnish-inspired Black Bread!) online for Wednesday pickup.
​
See you at the market next Saturday.

It happens this way sometimes after deep emotion. It happens this way after rage or sorrow, after wonder or happiness: I find myself adrift, feeling tender and inexplicably melancholy. Long hours in the closed box of the commissary didn’t help. Thinking about my mormor while I mixed made me cry. Listening to an interview with Robert Macfarlane as I shaped the loaves filled my chest and squeezed my throat with longing. When I queued up a song from the interview, a song washed up from the widening ripples of Macfarlane’s book, Landmarks, the music broke over me like a wave, leaving me drenched and breathless.

At the end of my midweek deliveries I stopped at the cafe to drink espresso and reread my favorite chapters of Landmarks, wrapping myself in the room’s familiar warmth while familiar people came and went around me. But at home in my quiet house, the melancholy again pressed close. Instead of opening my laptop to start the week’s administrative work, I curled up in the sunshine on my bed and fell asleep.

I woke rested and restless. I lay for a while, staring out the window at the sunlit trees, and then got up and went downstairs, tied on my running shoes, and took off for the water. The wind cooled my face and throat, slid into my curled palms and up the inside of my arms, chilled the sweat in the crease of my elbows. I breathed through my mouth, tasting wet earth and leaf mold on the back of my tongue. The bay, when I reached it, was a brilliant blue darkening out towards the paler blue islands, under a white blue sky. The water and sky, the bright snowberries and the glossy, red rosehips in the hedgerows, the peaks of Baker and Twin Sisters gleaming over the hill behind me, the little brown rabbit watching from the striped shadows of dried chicory and thistle on the hillside, they were all beautiful.

My left shoe was squeaking, a small, surprised noise every time I rolled forward on the ball of my foot. I ran to the top of the park and let gravity pull me down, arms loose, stride wide, feet pounding. And then up the steep, washed-out trail beside the stairs, pushing hard with quads and lungs. Down and up, down and up, till my muscles shivered and I gasped for breath.

After the last climb I took off my shoes, tied the laces together, and tucked my socks inside. I walked home barefoot, feeling the cold earth, feeling the gravel too sharp for my shoe-soft soles, feeling the ungiving pavement and the wet moss at the border between lawn and street that squeezed out icy water like a wrung sponge.

“We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world,” Macfarlane wrote, “—its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits—as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally ‘losing touch’, becoming disembodied.”

I did not have the work-productive Wednesday I’d planned, not the day of spreadsheets and email; it was a good day. By evening, as I stood talking to friends in our steamy kitchen, I felt settled. “Living in one sense at a time to live all the way through” had anchored me again to my body, and my body to the world. See you at market, maybe.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I had meant to start prep for THANKSGIVING ORDERS this week, but I'm nothing if not predictable: I haven't yet begun. Which means orders are still open if you need bread or pastry for your holiday table. Pickups Wednesday 11/27 at Cafe Velo between 9am and 7pm.

Sweets: Apple Cake, Gingerbread Bundt
Breads: Rosemary Rolls, Red & White, Roasted Potato & Garlic (and Mountain Rye, but it's under the regular Wednesday Bread heading, just to make the process more convoluted)

Also, we will NOT BE AT MARKET next Saturday, 11/30, because I want to eat dinner Thursday with my family, when I'd otherwise be starting fermentation for the market.

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Rosemary Cornmeal (for stuffing! and eating, of course)
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap Cookie
Apple Scone (jamless, strawberry jam, marmalade)
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

Until now, I’d always delivered to the front door of the restaurant. I’d lean my bike against one of the outdoor tables, open the trailer box, hoist two large bags of bread up into an awkward, two-arm hug, bang on the door with my elbow till the cook let me in, drop the bags on a table between the overturned chairs, and leave. Easy. But staff or schedules had changed. The restaurant was empty now on Wednesday mornings. I got directions to the basement delivery door and my own alarm code. No big deal, I thought. I could handle a change in routine.

Around back, at the end of a dead end alley, I leaned my bike against a stack of kegs. The alley was empty but for me and two men drinking out of paper bags. I walked to the unmarked door, decided that perhaps this was a good place to lock my bike, walked back to my bike and locked the front wheel to the frame, walked back to the door, decided that I shouldn’t leave my pannier and helmet behind, turned back to the bike to retrieve them, returned to the door and, at last, opened it. Immediately, the alarm began to shrill. I fumbled right and then left for the light switch. It was taped over, damn it. Who tapes over the light switch in a windowless basement? The alarm was still shrieking at me. How long did I have? Finally, my hand hit a second switch. The fluorescent lights flickered on. I crossed the room quickly, scanning the walls for the alarm box. There, by the inside door. I entered my code. The noise stopped. My heart was beating too fast. I returned outside to my bike for the bread, hoisted the bags up in an awkward, two-arm hug, fumbled for the door handle, and found it locked. Bread back into the boxes, key out of my pocket, door unlocked and propped open with my pannier, bread bags hoisted and carried through the open door, pannier hooked with a blindly seeking foot, and I was in. The door slammed shut. I crossed the room, again, passing the blessedly silent alarm, fumbled open the far door, climbed the stairs (still hugging the bread), fumbled open another door, and I was in the empty restaurant. I walked to a table and dropped the bags between the overturned chairs. I had done it.

But when I returned to the door at the top of the stairs I found it locked. I looked around, hopefully. The room was quiet and still entirely empty. I tried the basement door again. Definitely locked. There was nothing for it. I turned around and marched across the restaurant and out the front door. The front door started to swing shut behind me… and then it stuck. I pushed. It didn’t budge. I opened it again and tried to close it. The door jam was in the way. How was the door jam in the way? We wrestled back and forth, the door and I, until at last, with a heave, I triumphed.

Now, at this point the reasonable thing to do would have been to walk around the block to the alley’s entrance, but I wasn’t feeling very reasonable. I scrambled over the patio wall instead, climbed carefully down the other side, picked my way across the blackberry thicket, and wiggled through the only gap in the chain link not sewn shut with barbed wire. I was in the alley, and, thank god, so was my bicycle. I went back into the basement one last time, rearmed the alarm, grabbed my pannier and helmet off the floor, and walked out, leaving the light on behind me.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

THANKSGIVING ORDERS are up!
Order today at market with cash or check or online with a credit card by Wednesday, Nov 20.
Pickup Wednesday, Nov 27, downtown (exact location TBD)

Sweets:
Apple Cake - because it's my favorite and should be yours, too. Rye, buckwheat, and heirloom apples. 78% Whatcom grown by weight.
Gingerbread Bundt - in all its dark and sticky glory.

Breads:
Rosemary Rolls - with a little toasted corn & olive oil
Red & White - for a large or larger table bread
Roasted Potato & Garlic - 100% Washington grown (except the salt)
Harvest Miche - of wheat, rye, buckwheat, & corn

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap Cookie
Apple Marmalade Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
5 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, CIDER RYE

A bakery in Southeast Idaho was giving away their deck oven. “Free to a good home,” read the email’s subject line. They had to be out of their space in two weeks; they needed it gone. “Holy shit!” I thought. “A free oven!” And then, “Could I do it?” Could I close down the bakery and rent a truck, disassemble six tons of metal and concrete, of gas and electrical lines, load and secure it all, and drive back across two states and over the Cascades in early November? Or maybe I could hire a driver? Hire a crew to break down and crate? The possibilities flailed in my head. I emailed the bakery. I called my dad to talk it over. I texted friends and acquaintances, bakers, millers, and farmers, asking, How? and, What if? and, Is this crazy?

The deal was so good it dazzled me. An oven is the most expensive tool in most bakeries. A free oven, or even an oven that cost $5,000 or $10,000 to disassemble, move, store, and reassemble would completely change the startup budget of the bakery caught half way between dream and plan in my mind. But. There was no bakery yet. There wasn’t even a location for a bakery. And this oven was big, with over twice the capacity I’d planned for even in my most ambitious projections. It was an oven for a wholesale operation, not a bicycle-based, neighborhood bakery. I spun and spun, caught in anticipation and indecision. I went to bed exhausted and wide awake, feeling like I used to after a day of rock climbing and the constant push-pull of fear and exhilaration.

In the morning, instead of stuffing food, sneakers, and headphones into my panniers and hurrying to the kitchen to start the day’s mix, I made coffee and toast and sat down to think some more. I sat for a long time. When I finally rode to work I was hours late and settled. It was the wrong oven. Even free, it was the wrong oven. I let it go.

The day of undeciding left me clumsy-tired in the bakery, and certain of two things: 1. It was time and past to become machine literate, or at least machine conversational, to get comfortable tinkering, fixing, taking apart, and reassembling equipment (other than my bicycle) so that the next time some large and unwieldy baking tool became urgently available, I would be more prepared, and 2. I have an unexpectedly strong network of people skilled in business, in machines and electrical work, in logistics and planning, who, when I ask, will answer with advice, probing questions, and, “How can I help?”

I often worry that I’ve isolated myself with this business, with it’s unreasonable hours and endless demands. I miss more friend gatherings than I make, and when I do show up there’s a good chance I’ll leave early or fall asleep in the armchair in the corner. I haven’t made time for major community involvement in years. But when I reached out Monday, people reached back. I have a community despite myself. Thank you.
Sophie
Owner | Baker

THANKSGIVING ORDERS are up! (or they will be shortly. Give me a few minutes to update the online store.)
Order online with a credit card or at the market with cash or check
Pickup Wednesday, Nov. 27, downtown (exact location TBD)

Sweets:
Apple Cake - because it's my favorite and should be yours, too. Rye, buckwheat, and heirloom apples. 78% Whatcom grown by weight.
Gingerbread Bundt - in all its dark and sticky glory.

Breads:
Rosemary Rolls - with a little toasted corn & olive oil
Red & White - for a large or larger table bread
Roasted Potato & Garlic - 100% Washington grown (except the salt)
Harvest Miche - of wheat, rye, buckwheat, & corn

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap Cookie
Apple Oat Scone (with or without marmalade)
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
6 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, WILD & SEEDY

I called the city with a business tax question. “All of our representatives are currently serving other customers,” a recording informed me. Customers? I thought, incredulous. Customers? I hung up and called back to listen again. “All of our representatives are currently serving other customers,” the calm, male voice said again. I hung up a second time.

This was an honest misspeak, a habit of phrase. I probably wouldn’t have noticed were it not for Citizens United, the upcoming election, and the works I’ve read recently by Robert Macfarlane on the intimate relationship between how we live on the land and our landscape vocabulary, and Robin Wall Kimmerer on the grammar of animacy and how language defines the boundaries of our knowing. Words are not passive. Language shapes our understanding of the world as much as the world we live in shapes our language. “Customers” caught my attention and held it because it is so easy to imagine citizens of a democracy becoming customers of plutocracy. Sometimes it feels like we already are.

VOTE. The General Election is this Tuesday. Read voters’ guides. Read the newspaper. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Fill out your ballot and post it or drop it in one of the ballot boxes. Whatever you think of our national politics, local politics matter, and here YOUR VOTE COUNTS.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
8 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, RUGBROD

,It’s been years since I’ve spent a day alone. Not without people alone, or at least, not only that. I mean alone without conversation, without books or screens or radio for company, without work. Often, the minutes of my bike commute are the only time I spend alone all day, and even those I sometimes interrupt with a text message or a quick, pointless check of Instagram. In the clutter and noise of my daily life I begin to think distraction is normal. I begin to think that productivity is important, forgetting that being present—to my work, to a conversation, to rain and sky and the strength of my body when I run—is what matters most. Often, it’s artists and writers who speak about stillness as a daily practice, about making time for meditation or boredom, for daydreaming or walking without direction, but I think such time alone is something we all need.

I remember the last day I spent alone. I was still living in the islands. It was Yom Kippur, late fall and damp cold. I drove the truck to Shark Reef and walked out to the rocks above San Juan Channel where I sat for hours, watching the water, the sky, two sea lions cruising north against the tide. I sat and thought about my mormor, who had died that February, and about other things I’ve long forgotten. But eight years later I still remember the feeling. I still remember the anxiety of having nothing to do, nothing to distract me; I remember the beauty and stillness of that gray, fall day, and the wonder of being part of it.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps
(I tried to make you Pan de Muerto, too. They look beautiful, but I ate one this morning and... I forgot the salt. So instead you'll be getting bread pudding next week.)

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
9 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, POLENTA

On Wednesday night the middle school library filled up with adults. They were neighbors, school teachers and staff, grassroots organizers, college students from up the hill, city council members, civil servants, gardeners, and hunger relief workers. They lived in, worked in, organized in, grew food in, studied, or were curious about our neighborhood’s food desert.

For me, the neighborhood acts as a collection of homes. I haven’t claimed or been claimed by these streets and schools. I’m a renter in a communal house, and therefore, by experience if not definition, impermanent. My neighbors are neighbors by proximity rather than daily contact; ours is a block of back yards, not front porches. I can come and go as I please because I have a bike, because, to me, $2 round trip bus fare is pocket change, because I can walk or run across the city and sometimes do. I haven’t thought much about our neighborhood food desert.

When we circled the cafeteria tables to talk problems and solutions, I listened. I kept notes for the group. “Imagine money is no barrier,” the activity’s organizer told us. “What would you do?” And my table mates told me. They told me not only what they would do, but what they were doing. The most inspiring part wasn’t the ideas themselves, it was that, with or without funding, so many of them were already being implemented.

Near the end, our Council rep stood up. “We can do all this,” she said, “but who will be living here to use the services?” And I could see it almost like it had already happened, because in so many neighborhoods it already has: the community-owned grocery, the parking lot farmers market, the network off urban gardens and food-share boxes, the scratch-made school lunches and community dinners, the vegetable truck with it’s tinny jingle, all the dreams and organizing and hard work, past and present, realized, and the neighborhood gone, flattened by gentrification.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
9 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, RING RYE

My life is not righteous. I do unnecessary harm daily through thoughtlessness or laziness or ignorance. I know this to be true. But have you noticed how often people try to use the gap between hope and execution to invalidate counter cultural ideas? As if one cannot be an idealist and fallible at the same time. As if one cannot be hopeful and human.

Earlier this week I was, reluctantly, trying to explain anti-consumerism to a skeptical acquaintance. “You drive, right?” No, not really. “But you have a cell phone?” Yes. “Well then, you buy things.” Never mind the absurdity of the statement--of course I buy things--that was the end. Idea refuted. Q.E.D. In the moment, I was annoyed and defensive, but by the time I was trudging through the market bake yesterday I was curious about his conclusion to the conversation, and my own. Our lives are complicated and contradictory. To live entirely without hypocrisy, it seems to me, we would have to be cynical or apathetic. As long as we believe strongly, as long as we are curious and kind, as long as we work to do less unnecessary harm, isn’t that a good beginning, rather than an end to the argument for living thoughtfully?

“My ideals are often one step ahead of my ability to fully embody them,” activist Mark Boyle wrote, “and that is no bad thing; in fact… I wonder if hypocrisy might be the highest ideal of all.”

Off to load up for market.
See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
10 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, SMOKY OAT

I left the kitchen just after seven last Monday. Riding towards home I caught slices of a sky melted apricot yellow between the buildings. The color was luminous and deep. I changed course, rode hard towards Squalicum, hoping to catch the color, hoping as the desire knotted under my collar bone and tightened my throat. I was too slow. By the time I stopped above the beach the sunset had settled into a lovely, unsurprising orange. I stayed anyways, leaning against my bike, watching the sunset and the crescent moon, watching the silhouettes of herons flying north and the colors reflected in the glassy bay, till a jetski revving loops across the bright water and the brittle music playing from a cell phone down the beach drove me away.

I would be earlier next time, I decided. I would go down to the water to watch the sunset every day the sky was clear. But I didn’t. I worked late all week. I rode home in the dark.

Celina will be working the market today, but I might see you when I stop by to shop.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Gingerbread Cake
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
11 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, Farmer Rye