 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
I’m learning how to darn. So far I’ve inexpertly managed a few flat mends; I have yet to attempt anything advanced like sock heels or cuffs. My foray into darning was inspired by a book I picked up a few months ago from the library--Mending Life, by sisters Sonya and Nina Montenegro—which is both a practical introduction to mending clothes and an exploration of mending as a practice of healing and restoration. I returned the book weeks ago, but both its simple darning instructions and the idea that mending clothes could be an expression of a larger ethic have stuck in my mind. What if caring for everyday objects, for people, for our communities, for land and water here and everywhere are tangled vines growing from the same roots? “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote. “What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” I don’t think darning a hole in a sweater takes the place of political action, or that individual action can change systemic problems, but maybe caring for household goods is one way to appreciate the material gifts of our daily lives—the food, clothing, and objects—and our responsibility to them. Maybe mending can be a small medicine for the large hurt of living in a culture of extraction and consumption. Sophie Owner | Baker
A good morning. Pale blue sky and the clouds back lit to the east. Crows fly by by the dozen, winging south. The maple outside the window is green gold. I have a book for every mood and desire in stack next to me: a book on time and culture, on time and landscape, on wilding marginal agricultural land, on living deliberately, and on climate hope, plus a couple of paperback mysteries just for fun. You know the feeling when you’re just so pleased with the state of things it fills you up? I have a memory from childhood of lying under the covers with a flashlight long after bedtime, rereading a favorite book and being so overfull of self-satisfied pleasure—the secret of being up late, the swashbuckling adventure story, the warm bed on a cold night—I had to wiggle out my joy. Like that. Lots to worry about in the world, and I will, but right now I have a new day, a pile of good books, coffee brewing, and the promise of sunshine. I hope your morning is just as sweet. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red Wheat ($7.50 / 720g) Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 750g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingerbread Cake ($6-$16) Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies ($5 / 2) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION / WEEKLY PREORDERS Order for the coming Wednesday or sign up for all the remaining Wednesdays through Dec 16. Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, Happy Valley/Fairhaven RED WHEAT Subscription - whole wheat table bread MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat TOAST Subscription - a new tinned loaf every week Nov 18 - Oat & Honey Nov 25 - Rosemary Cornmeal Dec - TBD Sure, there are a million, or at least a few dozen, baking books on the shelves of your local library. Absolutely, you should explore the collection (breads are in the 641.815’s), pull out every book with a pretty spine and flip through its pages, pile the best up next to you on the floor as you browse, and emerge from the stacks with your arms so full you can’t see where you’re walking. Feeding your book lust is one of great, gluttonous pleasures of the public library. But what I’m most excited about right now are not the abundance of new baking books, glossy and beautiful though they are, but all the zines I’ve bought, bartered, and been gifted recently. I received another in the mail this morning and have spent a few happy hours exploring Katie Gourley’s lovely new “baking for biodiversity” book (it’s not yet up on her website but while you wait, check out her past tiny books), flipping back through my incomplete collection of Lost Bread’s grain zines, and rereading the thought-provoking zine on climate change I got while visiting a friend in Boulder last month. It's enough to make me itch to write a follow up volume to last year’s Up Rye Zine, but first I need a direction, a thesis, a story to fill the pages. Do you have ideas for the Up Rye Zine vol. 2, or recommendations of other small publications I need to add to my alternative library? Sophie Owner | Baker   Did you know you can still sign up for the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION? It runs through March 25, with pickup every Wednesday in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe). Sign up or order a single loaf for the week ONLINE. Along with Red & White and Mountain Rye, each week I make a different Baker's Choice bread. 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! The once a month Winter Market is today. Raven Breads won't be there, but you should go anyway! I was going to write about biking through the flooded Skagit flats and all the astonishing, wondrous birdlife, but then I remembered I had a better bird story up my sleeve. Here, for your entertainment, is the tale of the Williams' Warbler: After dinner, after the dishes were washed and dried, I lifted a lemon sucker from the tin on the counter and headed out back to unload the car. Over towards the fence I heard a bird warbling, a thin, drawn out cry. I propped a box on my hip and turned to the dark trees, searching for a silhouette, a clue to the maker of this melancholy song. No movement. I took my load to the house and returned for another, listening to the dark. The candy was sweet and bright on my tongue, the night almost warm. Not till I was climbing the back steps for the second time did I finally pinpointed the call. Here. It was right here! It was my own breath, whistling out of my stuffed up nose while my mouth was busy with the candy. The end. Sophie Owner | Baker Did you know you can still sign up for the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION? It runs through March 25, with pickup every Wednesday in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe). Sign up or order a single loaf for the week ONLINE. Along with Red & White and Mountain Rye, each week I make a different Baker's Choice bread. 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! Well, having spent the week melting my brain onto my computer screen while pretending to build spreadsheets and actually jumping pointlessly between browser tabs and stumbling down useless internet rabbit holes, I have nothing to say to you here. Not even a good walk through the woods to report on, or musings from an afternoon spent watching the rain on the ocean. I didn't leave the house yesterday! That's how bad it's been. So instead, I offer you an interview published earlier this week on the food blog Stir the Pots, given before my bad work habits destroyed my capacity for complex thought and prolonged attention. And now that the rain has stopped I'm off for a ride to check out the Anacortes Farmers Market. Our own winter Bellingham Farmers Market is next Saturday. Raven Breads won't be there, but you should go anyway. Sophie Owner | Baker Did you know you can still sign up for the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION? It runs through March 25, with pickup every Wednesday in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe). Sign up or order a single loaf for the week ONLINE. Along with Red & White and Mountain Rye, each week I make a different Baker's Choice bread. My choices this winter are: 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! There's 1 spot left in our March class! Sign up through the Guild website. Start Where You Are: Using & Troubleshooting Local Grain Instructors: Mel Darbyshire & Sophie Williams Come learn tools for assessing, baking with, and troubleshooting local whole grains. Leaving the commodity market to support local farms and mills often means dealing with grains that vary from field to field, farm to farm, and harvest to harvest. In this class we’ll bake with wheat and rye flours of variable quality, using sensory evaluation and the batch specs to choose products and adapt formulas to best suit our grain. We’ll talk about how growing conditions effect grain quality, how grain quality effects baking properties, and what to do with a bad harvest. March 5-6, 2020 Thursday 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm Friday 9 am - 4:00 pm The Bread Lab 11768 Westar Lane - Burlington, WA 98233 Registration Deadline: Sunday, March 1st Skill Level: Intermediate to Advanced 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 All day in the bakery I listen to stories. I know the danger of living distracted. I recognize the contradiction of working divided, my hands in the dough and my mind far away, when I’m trying to build a business deeply rooted in place and time. But oh, the days are long and hard, and the kitchen is an unfriendly space, and I’ve always loved being read to. When I was a child my parents took turns reading to me before sleep. I was hungry for stories. “Keep reading,” I pleaded when they closed the book for the night. “Keep reading!” I ordered, imperious, spoiled, desperate to hear what happened next, even when I could barely keep my eyes open, even when I’d heard the story two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost knew it by heart. Twenty five years later and though the books are now audio files downloaded from the library, not spine-cracked paper, and I’m standing in the commissary kitchen, not tucked into a trundle bed, not much has changed. I’m tired from my scratchy eyes to the aching soles of my feet and it’s hours past dinner time, but still I fuss with one more task, kneeling to scrub that far grungy corner under the sink or squaring up the rolling racks just so. I’ve checked the burners and turned off the hood. My bike is leaning by the back door, panniers packed. Outside the sky is darkening, and if I hurry I might catch pastel end of sunset. But oh, I want so badly to hear what happens next, even when home and dinner are waiting, even when I’ve listened to the book two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost know it by heart. 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 Three Plum Cake Gleaner's Apple Pie Shortbread This week in the Bread Subscription Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Milk & Oat  “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by,” Annie Dillard wrote. I think about this as I work. It is not a good day. I am tired to the soles of my feet. The work pulls me deeper into the night and won’t let go. I trudge on. I daydream about good days: the exuberant pleasure of a day spent swimming in the ocean, or reading books, or sitting over long, leisurely meals with friends. I think about good days as I load and unload the oven, as I stack dishes from the drying rack, as I sweep and mop the floor, wipe down the counters, scrub the sinks, and carry the compost out into the dark alley. They’re Sundays, all, and sweet and sunlit in my mind. But of course, I don’t live a life of Sundays. I wouldn’t, even if I could, though the weeks between are often blurred by schedule and repetition. Is that what Dillard meant? That the days of sun and pleasure are easy enough to find, if you have the time and inclination. It is adding up the days between, weaving the hours and their mundane tasks into the fabric of a meaningful life, that is the great and difficult work. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing…Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern." See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + The Whole Garden Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oatmeal Blackberry Scone Buckwheat Peach Scone Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Toasted Sesame Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Scone, Shortbread, etc. When the mixing and shaping are done for the day, when the bread is rising, and the cookies and scones are lined up in orderly rows up and down the sheet pans, then the real work is finished. Still, hours remain. Still there is the baking, the oven loaded and unloaded and loaded again, the proofing baskets to scrub, dishes to wash, cooled loaves to stack in their stacks of boxes, walls to wipe down, the floor to sweep and mop. It is late morning on a day that started well before sunrise, and the work is not even half done. So I make a cup of coffee, milky and strong, and sit out back where I can see the alley and a ribbon of sky through the window. I open the library’s collection of digital books on my phone, and go in search of someone to read me a story. It has to be the right story. A real sweep-you-up, fast-paced, wild rumpus of a story. A story to lift me off my aching feet, above my stiff knees, away from the sweat and flour grit and my tired-sticky eyes. A story to carry me through the late morning, over the afternoon, and deep into the evening. It is a wonderful and disconcerting thing, to lose myself so completely in a book. When I am reading, or being read to, I no longer hear the world clattering around me or notice the passing of time. It has always been this way. Theoretically, I believe in being fully attentive to my work. After all, I spend most of my days working. If I don’t pay attention to the working hours, I could lose the greater part of my adult life. But in practice, my baking days are too long, the kitchen too loud and poorly lit. My body tolerates more than my mind, so I let the stories carry my mind away while my body moves steadily on through the familiar motions. It is the bike ride home that brings me back. After hours of living divided, the steady pump of tired legs, the air moving over my skin, the smells of the night, hook my mind and pull it inside my body. Afterward, if I have the energy and the light, I’ll run down to the water. Standing on the broken willow at the path’s edge, looking out at the ocean and sky through its branches, I’ll listen to the waves wash their steady beat against the shore. Each wave is like a breath. Each breath pulls me farther inside my skin, till my mind stills, and I am whole again. TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + The Whole Garden Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Strawberry Buckwheat Scone Sweet & Sour Cherry Galette Sour Cherry & Hazelnut Tart Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Country Rye Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Scone, Shortbread, etc. See you soon.
Sophie Owner | Baker |
