Most mornings I drink coffee, a habit I picked up in my mid-twenties while driving down California to visit bakeries. Bakers who work through the night drink a lot of coffee. But sometimes I pass by the grinder and walk out the back door instead, cup in hand, to pick my morning's drink. I've been mixing up potions since I was a kid—the witch's brews exploding in the kitchen or fermenting under the back steps of my parents' house; the summer I got a pocket sized dessert book and baked my way through it from jelly roll cake to profiterole; the leaves and petals and bits of seaweed I crushed together, trying to make the perfect colors to paint the garden fairies—taking mundane ingredients and combining them into something magic.

I know nothing about herbalism so there's no logic to my teas. I add a bit of whatever catches my eye: calendula petals, the drying flowers of hyssop or lavendar, echinacea, German chamomile or pineapple weed, a pinch of the lovely chocolate mint we dug from a long overgrown garden, a raspberry leaf. There's much outside the fenced kitchen garden that I have yet to taste—the bright blue flowers of the roadside chicory, the goldenrod like a green yellow flame in the back field, the sour docks and sorrels, the tender spring leaves of plantain and self heal—and more yet I don't know and so pass without notice.

It's good to learn my place by sight. Better to learn it by eyes, hands, nose, and tongue. So I ask the names of plants, watch where the water pools in winter, feel the hard bite of the shovel into dry, summer clay, breath the warm, resinous air under the pine and the soft, cool air under the old apple tree, and sometimes, like a child, I wander through the garden picking flowers and leaves to mix a morning potion.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

The days grow shorter. I rode home from the bakery in the dark. Past the bridge the smell of blackberries was sweet and strong enough to taste. I left my bike leaning against a post and found the thicket by helmet light. The berries were fat and shining. I ate all I could reach.

Next week we'll have blackberry snack cake. This week the cakes are full of blueberries and raspberries from Broadleaf Farm and nectarines from Martin Family Orchards.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

The snack cake is my favorite. It’s the simplest of pastries—flour, butter, sugar, egg—and easily adapted to the changing seasons. Right now we’re making it with cornmeal, a bit of last winter’s preserved lemon, and summer berries. Blueberry, raspberry, and gooseberry this week. If the coming week is hot, next weekend we’ll have blackberries. And then it will be time for figs with fig leaf extract. And then plums with buckwheat and bitter almond (apricot, perhaps, or cherry stone). And pears with earthy black currant or warm, spicy cardamom. And finally, as the days darken, apple, oat, and cinnamon. All these lovely flavors and fruits in a single, simple cake!

I decided last week to calculate how much of the bakery's food is Washington grown. It took some time—my spreadsheet skills stop somewhere between pivot tables and SUMIFS, and well before the mastery I’d need to build an interconnected database of sales, ingredients, and recipes—but eventually I pulled the right data together from my many workbooks. My goal with the bakery has always been to make food that’s good both for you, the eater, and also the workers and lands that produced it. It’s an impossible ambition, of course. The food system is too complex and too broken to feed us without harm. The best I can do, the best I know to do, is to find the shortest and most transparent supply chains, to buy directly from producers I know whenever I can, and to rely on third party certifications when I can’t. For our tropical foods—spices, chocolate, sugar—that means buying Organic and Fair Trade certified ingredients from processors who contract directly with small farmers or farmer coops. Our Organic seeds and oils come from an Oregon distributor who shares our values. We buy our Organic flours from two Skagit mills, both of whom contract their wheat and rye with Washington farmers, and our eggs, dairy (with the glaring exception of the Organic, cultured butter), honey, nuts, and produce directly from Whatcom and Skagit farmers. So far this year, 75% of the bakery’s ingredients by weight were grown in Washington.

I was surprised by the number, and gratified. Sourcing ingredients well is expensive and time consuming and I’m always falling frustratingly short of my own standards. 75% is pretty damn good. Better than I would have guessed. But here’s the thing: Raven Bakery is too small for our purchasing decisions to impact even the smallest of our local farmers. At this scale, where our food comes from and how it’s made is really only useful as a story. I know how to tell the story in this long and rambling format—thank you for reading this far!—but how do I tell it at a glance? How do I tell it through branding or marketing or in a few words to a new customer? How do I tell it simply when the story of our food system is so complex?

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Sunshine and heat. We sprawled in a tree shadow at the edge of the point. I love the rocky edges of our landscape with their the moss and lichen, their dry, wispy grass, their wind-twisted fir growing impossibly from cracks in the bedrock, rose thickets in the protected hollows. I love the green to gold transition, walking out of the cool forest, the path cut through salal as high as my head, onto the sun-bleached rock. I love the smell of dry grass and dry earth, the sweetness of yarrow crushed underfoot, the salt brine and fir sap. E was asleep. I read Ada Limón and watched the sky. We stayed, moving with the tree’s shadow, until it slid off the edge and out of reach.

Back home again this week the familiar work of baking bread and the dauntingly unfamiliar work of building a bakery swallow my days. No time for naps or poetry. No time to follow a shadow across the afternoon. The work, both works, are going well. They stretch out in all directions. I think about the edges between land, water, and sky.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

But it’s hard to think about work when the trees are casting dappled shadows and the forest is full of birdsong. Ezra is currently loading up the market bike while I, for the first time in four months, have escaped the tight triangle of bakery, house, and farm and gone away. We left well before sunrise and arrived with a whole day ahead of us. A whole weekend, in fact. Two entire days! If you, too, are self-employed, or partnered to a farmer, or a farmer yourself, you know how delicious a summer weekend away is. There are ravens talking back and forth across the clearing, dragonflies above the tall grass, and just now a ruby throated hummingbird dipped down to drink from the phacelia. The world is green and green and green and blue above.

I promised last week to tell you about the new bakery, though, so before I settle fully into the weekend there is this: Raven Bakery has a new home. Or will have a new home. We’ll start building out a storefront downtown in August. I have plans and permits filed and a deposit made on a large and beautiful bread oven. The space has south and east facing windows and high ceilings. Most of it will be taken up by production with a small retail area in front. It’s going to be more functional than stylish, but with good light and good bread functional is more than enough. Building a kitchen from scratch—even one without any fancy trims—is staggeringly expensive and I’m going to be asking for private loans from the community once I have a better sense of what terms are fair and reasonable. If you have experience on either side of the lending equation I’d welcome your insights. Right now, though, I’m going to put away my computer and all thoughts of work, take a nap, and then ride into the village for a breakfast pastry and coffee at someone else’s bakery.

I hope your weekend is just as sweet.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Do you ever get poems stuck in your head? For days I've had the rhythm of a poem beating inside me with only the words "still water" to grasp hold of. It was only just now, remembering the empty beach, the light, the still water that I remembered the rest of Wendell Berry's The Peace of Wild Things.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

We'll be pausing the midweek bake when the current bread subscription ends in two weeks. I need time to work on the bakery build--equipment sourcing, project management, financing, planning operations--and to think. I miss how clear and sharp my mind is in the winter when the work slows down and I have the time to move unhurried on foot, bicycle, and ski. I miss the way complex ideas simmer beneath the surface of my mind while I spend my days moving across the landscape and then bubble over, fully formed. The busyness of the market season drains my imagination dry. I'm going to take a little time next month to move, to leave the city, to find magic again. We'll still be at the market every Saturday.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

When I first sent out this small ode to bicycles in the fall of 2020 a number of people very rightly pointed out that my use of the imperative implies that all people can ride a bike. There are many reasons–including physical ability, the danger and distances of roads designed for cars, and the scrabbling busyness of our daily lives–that people might not want or be able to ride. So, yes, I think that bicycles are a wonderful way to travel. And yes, we need to keep fighting for infrastructure for pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit in our cities built for cars (add your voice to the new Bellingham Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan!). And yes, until there are safe, functional ways for all of us to move under our own power or with public transit, and until our culture and economy value life over convenience, most people will drive most of the time.

You should ride a bike
from Oct. 2020

I could tell you all the reasons not to drive a car. I could tell you about noise, air, and water. I could tell you about environmental justice. I could tell you about war, about fracking, about the existential threat of climate change. I could tell you about the squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, song birds, cats, and crows I pass daily, flattened on the road. Or the coyote, the beaver, the deer, and the fox laid out dead in the ditch. I could tell you about the barred owl I found yesterday on my way to work, about her soft, curled toes, her unruffled feathers, her pale face, her eyes, one closed to the sky, the other open to the pavement, unseeing.

But you know those stories. And besides, a bicycle isn’t an anti-car. It needs no negative justification. You should ride a bike because it’s a delight; because your legs are strong, or will be, and feeling their power is a power in itself; because you can go so fast!; because the air above the creek is cool and wet; because on a warm night the scents bloom around you; because the sky is more beautiful than any ceiling. Riding your bike on a blue summer day is easy and sweet, but riding through a winter afternoon can be its own, uncomfortable kind of pleasure, your headlight cutting a wedge of raindrops into the dark, the wind in your face, the wet trickling cold down your collar. The comfort of the indoors is seductive, but does it make you feel alive? Does it make you laugh with wonder at the beauty of the day and your body in it?

You should ride a bike because you live here, in this place, in this weather, and you cannot love it from a distance behind walls and windows. You should ride a bike just for the joy of it.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

A good bake yesterday and this morning I woke up knowing how to build the new market display case. Between the Health Department's ever tightening rules and the physical limitations of transporting the entire market stand and product by bicycle, I'd been mulling over how to build a sturdy, collapsible case all week. As usual, I'm working right up until the deadline. They won't be fully sanded or finished, but hopefully these frames I'm slapping together will fold up and stand up when asked.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

The doe is bedded down near our neighbors shed, back legs tucked, front legs stretched out straight. I can see a fawn’s ears poking up from the grass in the back of the orchard. Yesterday we watched a small blackcap chickadee stumble on the ground below the snag where they’ve been nesting. Today she’s gone, eaten or in flight. There’s a woodpecker probing the snag’s bark now. Small, white backed, beautiful. Last weekend six skunk kits came prancing stiff-legged out from their burrow under the concrete slab. White blaze up the snout, white hat, white stripes down black backs and up the tops of their tails. They were fearless and curious and ungainly, dark eyes and noses questing, tails down when exploring and straight up when startled, though they were too young yet to spray. The boldest three discovered Tommy’s leather shoes and followed him up and down the yard till he distracted them with a plate set directly in their path. The wildlife rescue center said their daytime forays meant they were orphaned. We spent Sunday gathering them into a towel lined box. They fell asleep on the drive out to the center.

There’s nothing so interesting as baby animals inside the bakery, but the bread looks lovely today and the pastries are as sweet and buttery as ever. We’ll see you at market.

Sophie
Owner | Baker