The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the truest story about childhood I've read in a long time. It is a dark fairy tale, a story of monsters and magic, of wonder, and terrible powerlessness of childhood; a story about a time when magic is as likely as any other answer, before the hard edges of facts push the impossible out of the world. There is a scene early in the book when the little boy sits down to eat in the neighbors' farmhouse kitchen: "The daffodils sat like patches of sunlight, making that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful. The floor was made of red and gray flagstones. The walls were whitewashed. The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the Hempstocks' own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers." And now, every time I think about pastries, about new recipes, and what I role I want sweets to play in the bakery, I remember that scene. That's what I want in a pastry: comfort, substance, and flavor, with the satisfaction and sensual pleasure of cream running down a honeycomb. I want pastries that belong in a kitchen full of daffodils and sunlight, with a pot simmering on the stove, and muck boots piled, muddy, outside the door. I want pastries for wet fields and mountains, for hard work in all weather, for children in the street on a summer evening, and winter evenings that smell of woodsmoke, for kitchen gardens and old apple trees and bumblebees in the lavender and hyssop. Does that make sense? I can see it all so clearly in my mind. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Wheat Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Breakfast Scone (apple butter, raisins, hazelnuts, oats) Raspberry, Rhubarb, Buckwheat Scone Lemon Rhubarb Bar Shortbread PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/30 (place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup) Chocolate ($10) Mountain Rye ($7) Vollkornbrot ($8) I collect books from library the way some people buy clothes. Compulsively. Obsessively. With a thrill of new ownership that all too often fades once the books are in my possession. Every time I bike by the library, I feel the inexorable pull. All those unread books. All those beautiful words. All those stories, waiting for me! When she was little, my sister would heap her plate with food at the dinner table, insistent of her hunger. Once the plate was in front of her, though, she would hardly touch it. “My eyes were bigger than my stomach,” she would explain, apologetically. At the library, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Or maybe my imagination is bigger than the hours of the day? I collect armfuls of books, overloading my bike panniers and strapping extras to the back rack. When I’m inside the stacks, I never think of the books by my bed, half-read, or of the unread books on my bookshelf. The pull of possibility inside those uncracked spines is too strong. I never read all the books I check out, just as I never read all the books I buy. I sometimes wish, whimsically, that I could shut myself up in my house for a week and read a stack from top to bottom and bookend to bookend, but of course, life intrudes. And besides, the library is calling. There are so many books yet to explore. Wednesday 2/7 WINTER GARDEN ($8) A celebration of all the green herbs in the winter garden. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/14 CHOCOLATE ($10) A bittersweet black bread, with dark cocoa, dark chocolate chunks, and candied orange peel. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/21 SPROUTED EINKORN ($8) This ancient wheat is grassy and sweet. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Sophie
Owner | Baker What is the shape of your best day? Mine starts on the dark side of 5 am, when I wake, look at my watch, and decide go back to sleep. Hours later, in the gray gloaming, I wake again, and reach for my book. There is no hurry. Breakfast will wait. When I get up on my best day, I put on water for tea and turn on the oven. I mix eggs, milk, and flour. I melt half a stick of butter in a skillet and pour in the batter. While the pancake rises, I sauté sliced apples in butter. I only burn a few. On my best day, I go back to bed after breakfast. I curl up by the window and read until noon. I finish one book and start another. The clouds thin to pale blue. The sunshine climbs over me till I’m all in light. Later, I go for a long walk. The snow is soft and reaches a few inches shy of my boot tops. I walk along the river, under black cottonwoods and alders, and the occasional ponderosa. The willow thickets are deep red. I listen to the water and watch my feet. There are tracks crisscrossing the snow in all directions. I follow a river otter’s tracks for a while till I come out onto the cobbled riverbank. Then I follow a deer. I see neither otter nor deer, but many birds. The great horned owl is asleep in her cottonwood snag, or at least, I think she’s asleep. She is exactly the same brown-gray as the bark, and I see no hint of yellow eyes. On my best day I make hot chocolate and take my mug and a book out onto the porch to catch the last of the light. I fold a blanket around my legs, like an invalid in one of the old, upright British novels I used to love so well. I read until the light begins to fade. Or maybe I just sit and watch the trees and the whitening sky. It doesn’t matter. This is my day to do with as I please. When darkness folds around the house at the end of my best day, I am inside where it is warm and bright. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will think of obligations, but tonight I am full on stories and sunshine and good food. There is no space left for work or worries. Steam rises from the mug in my hand, smelling of mint and chamomile. I sit back to watch the fire. This is the shape of my best day. Winter Bread Subscription Today is the LAST DAY to sign up! BAKER's CHOICE subscription MOUNTAIN RYE subscription VOLLKORNBROT subscription Wednesday Preorder Wild & Seedy Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot I'll be back on the west side and delivering the first of the Winter Bread Subscription this Wednesday to Birchwood, downtown, and Fairhaven.
Happy eating! Sophie Owner | Baker I walked out to the garden last night in the dark, finding my way by memory and the faint light of the neighbor's porch light. The ground beneath my boots had the springy feel of wet and well-aggregated soil. Crouching between the beds, I felt my way along the rows of carrots and beets for the biggest roots. They came out easily, with just a gentle tug at the base of the leaves, and I added them to my dinner basket, leaving the tops behind to mulch the cold ground. This morning I woke to the memory of a poem about moles by William Stafford, skimming just out of reach around the edges of my mind. I grasped at it for a while, but though I could remember the recognition and mild distaste I felt when I first read it as a child, I could find nothing of its shape or cadence. (Recognition, because Stafford has always spoken to me; distaste because moles are not especially romantic creatures. If I were to image myself an animal—and since I had not yet unlearned magic, this seemed a reasonable thing to do—I would rather it have been an elephant, or an owl). Eventually I got up from my warm nest of blankets and crossed to the bookshelf. And there it was: "Love the earth like a mole, / fur-near. Nearsighted." I was still smiling when I walked downstairs and out the back door to stand in the dark, breathing in the wet-earth smell at the beginning of a new day. "...each day nuzzle your way. Tomorrow the world." Saturday Market Red & White, Cinnamon Raisin, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame Pear Cake Gingerbread Shortbread + Granola Wednesday Preorder Red, White, & Blue Corn Nixtamal Mountain Rye Gingerbread Shortbread THANKSGIVING ORDER Rosemary Sea Salt loaves + rolls Burnt Sugar Pumpkin Pie Gingerbread Bundt Thanksgiving specials are up on the online store, and I'll have order sheets today at market. Let the feasting season begin! See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker POSTSCRIPT: Overheard
Honestly, I wanted this post on the Shocking Revelations! about sexual misconduct by powerful men to have more snark, and it's pretty damn snarky already. Still, it does a better job then most of the mainstream coverage at capturing the frustrated rage I feel every time I read another expression of outraged surprise that such behavior was known and abided. Because seriously, surprise? What misogynistic rock have these pundits been living under to miss the fact that womxn face violence and intimidation and harassment by men with grabby little hands ALL THE FUCKING TIME? By chance and the circumstance of my interests, I’ve read a pile of books and articles recently on the costs of capitalism, from science fiction, to business, to investigative reporting and white papers. I had thought that this week I might throw my own small stones against the wall of our peculiar economic institution. A brief elaboration of my anti-consumerism philosophy, perhaps, laid out in a bullet-pointed list, with witty caveats and sly asides. People are so fond of clever listicles, especially when the alternative is real and dark emotion. But I have always been too shy and earnest to play the class clown, and besides, the rules I try to live by are so simple they hardly deserve a list: don’t buy things you don’t need; if you need things, buy them used; and if they must be new, buy goods that are well-made and expensive. You know all that already. It is no great insight of mine that our blind and unquenchable hunger is consuming the world. On the bookshelf outside my childhood bedroom was a row of books by Adrienne Rich, and tucked inside The Dream of a Common Language was an event bill for a reading at Temple University in 1976, with the poem Power on one side, and on the other, a note to my mother in Mormor’s scratchy hand: And I sat and listened and wept silently, self conscious about my middle-aged maudlinity until I realized that the 20 year old sitting next to me had tears running down her cheeks. Thank you for introducing me to Adrienne Rich. - B I still remember my grandmother—molecular biologist, single mother, civil rights activist, a woman too big in both mind and body for the space society gave her—every time I read the poem. It is one of my favorites. I thought of it again as I finished reading yet another great tragedy of the Anthropocene, grief and anger closed like a hand around my throat. I thought of it because Marie Curie is a perfect allegory for our civilization, because we are brilliant and beautiful, curious and endlessly inventive, willingly blind and willfully denying to the end our wounds, “denying [our] wounds came from the same source as [our] power." POWER by Adrienne Rich Living in the earth-depositis of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate Today I was reading about Marie Curie: she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified It seems she denied to the end the source of the cataracts on her eyes the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate + Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Croissant Palmier Buckwheat Tart Shortbread + Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Mountain Rye Sweets And on a less woefully serious note, it's almost fall! Sign up for the first eight weeks of the FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION on the website or at market for weekly Wednesday pickups in Birchwood, downtown, or in Fairhaven. But if you want to sign up with a credit card online, you have to wait till tonight, because I'm once again running late, and out of time to update the website!
See you soon! Sophie Owner | Baker I am rarely alone while baking. All day and into the night I listen. The words keep me company through hours that can be achingly long, and block out some of the noise and chaos of the kitchen I share with a half dozen other businesses. I often start the day with news podcasts (oh, for a radio tuned to the gentle repetition of NPR, as in the kitchens of my childhood!). I listen to The Takeaway or Up First for the headlines, NPR Politics for the view inside the Beltway, Intercepted for a more cynical twist on the same, KUOW for happenings around the Sound. I am usually still alone in the kitchen at this point, the first desperate rush of mixing and shaping over, settled into the steadier rhythms of fermentation. I am moving fast and sure-handed. I reach for words as deep as still water, for ideas that will carry me like a river. Thich Nhat Hanh on mindfulness, or Atul Gawande on death. I am invigorated by the work and by the words. I am all possibility and hunger. The day crests, doughs mixed, temperature climbing despite the open door to the alley, oven on a continuous burn. I begin to tire. Just slightly. Not physically, yet, but my mind slows and my ambition flags. I focus on one step and then the next. There is no room anymore for philosophy, or natural history, or cultural criticism. I reach instead for a story, a bold narrative to carry me on. This week it was The Dispossessed. Another week Americanah, or All the Light We Cannot See: novels carried as much by the power of their story as by their writing. Around the twelfth or fourteenth hour I begin to fall. My feet ache, and my knees. My eyes are gritty. I am sticky with sweat and flour. The work has been going well, but it is far from over, and I want only to sit down. To lie down. To close my eyes, just for a little while. This is when I turn to the kind of books I might be embarrassed to read in public. Romances, thrillers, young adult novels: the books you might pass in the window of an airport book shop, or see stacked on the sidewalk outside a used book store for a dollar. I do not care anymore about the quality of the writing, as long as it isn’t distractingly bad. I don’t care about character development, or research accuracy. I am uncultured and exhausted. I want witty dialog, action, and a tidy happily-ever-after. These books are like junk food: immediately satisfying, distractingly salty-sweet, easily over-indulged, empty. But usually they are just enough of a treat to get me through the last hours and home to bed. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies (Exploded) Croissant + Pain au Chocolat Fig Danish Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Rosemary Sea Salt Mountain Rye Sweets 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.) I've been thinking about this UNEP report on sustainable lifestyles, and the Quartz article on conscious consumerism that led me to it, all week. They will likely shape next week's newsletter, so, you know, if you want to do your homework, you could read them before hand... I have come, recently, upon two very different ideas of loneliness. Hannah Arendt explores "organized loneliness" as the common ground for terror. The foundation for totalitarianism is laid, she argues, when people are separated from each other by ideology, and from reality by the inability to tell fact from fiction. Such isolation makes us, by definition, impotent. But isolation exists in the public and political realms. It is when private life, too, is taken, when "the most elemental form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world" is destroyed, that isolation becomes loneliness. The Origins of Totalitarianism is as fiercely relevant now, as nationalism sweeps the Western world, as it was in the aftermath of WWII. But as I turn these ideas of isolation and loneliness, of community and the role of civil society in democratic life, over in my mind, it is not crowds I crave, but the solitude to think. In her essay, "When I Was a Child I Read Books," Marilynne Robinson writes of loneliness as a value of the American West. She writes of the loneliness of open spaces and of the night sky, of summers at her grandparents' home in Idaho, when "the cows came home, and the wind came up, and Venus burned through what little remained of the atmosphere, and the dark and the emptiness stood over the old house like some unsought revelation." Yes, I think, reading her words again. Yes, this is true. And when I closed my eyes, I savored the dark. The loneliness of wild places, of knowing myself so small I'm hardly there at all, places me firmly in the world. It is the opposite of isolation. Can this vast, heart-filling loneliness live side by side with the small, bitter loneliness born of fear and division? Can the loneliness of poets and mystics be cousin to the loneliness of despots and ideologues? We still live in the geometric world built by the Greeks, where the linear logic of Non Contradiction argues that if one definition is true, its opposite must be false. But string theory builds layers upon parallel layers to our reality, and even the empty spaces between the stars are now full. We need not settle for either/or. We live in a world wide enough to encompass both/and. Loneliness can be brutal and dehumanizing. In loneliness we may, at last, hear "the singing of the real world." And while I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson and hanging out in the kitchen, I've also done a little baking... Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Strawberry Rose Danish Black Sesame & Fennel Palmiers Morning Buns Croissants Granola Wednesday Market Oats & Honey Mountain Rye Brown Butter Shortbread and other pastries See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Marilynne Robinson asked in my ear. I stopped, elbow deep in the dough, because it was, I realized, the very question I ask myself every day in a dozen different ways. It is the heart of small, everyday decisions about how to move through the world, and large, existential decisions about work and place and community. Who do I want to be, and how do I live as that better self? And then the forward march of Robinson's powerful mind and the immediacy of the task in front of me pulled me back into motion. Sometimes someone else articulates a thought or feeling you didn't know you had until you heard it said, and then it's so obvious, so fundamental, that you cannot imagine it unknown. We live much of our lives feeling alone in ourselves, even when surrounded by other people. The reminder that we are never truly alone, that someone else in the world, or many someones, holds in themselves the same experience, can come with a profound sense of recognition. It is a beautiful intimacy, to be so connected, even if it is across satellites, over centuries, or though the pages of a book. When I was young I was baffled by the singularity of being myself. Why am I only this girl, and no one else? I asked. It seemed to me that I might just as easily wake up tomorrow in another mind and body. A soul was such an essential thing to be tied forever to so ephemeral and mundane a vessel (though of course I understood this in much simpler terms—if only I had kept a journal at eight!). This was also a time when I thought often about death—my own—with great curiosity and no fear. It was certainly the most mystic period of my life, in those early days of self-consciousness, when I could not understand myself separate from the universe, before I learned the designated boundaries of self and mind. And why, I wonder, did the adult world feel it so imperative to teach me those boundaries? Why did they insist I learn to be alone? Perhaps when I reach for poets like William Stafford and Mary Oliver, when reading Wendell Berry fills me so deep with joy and grief that the familiar words bring me to tears, I am reaching also for this forgotten understanding of myself in the world. I read a psychology paper sometime early in my undergraduate arguing that we cannot have complex feelings without the words to articulate them. At the time we were also reading about deaf children raised without sign language, and the idea that their lack of language might leave them trapped not only in literal but also in mental silence was so hurtful that I wanted to reject the entire field of cognitive linguistics out of hand. Now, looking at the way that words have shaped my understanding of myself, I find the hypothesis compelling. How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Or maybe, how do we decide how to live, except by defining ourselves? At Market Today Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies S'mores on Nibby Chocolate Wafers Cardamom, Dark Chocolate, and Raspberry Rolls Rhubarb Polenta Upside Down Cake Granola Preorder Wednesday Pickup Red & White Mountain Rye Cinnamon Raisin Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker I have spent too many daylight hours these past weeks zombie-eyed in front of a screen, shuffling through the ugly underbelly of self-employment. I have been sorting the hundreds of unread emails, gathering scattered tax documents, trying to unearth bookkeeping mistakes now so far buried there's no hope of reconciliation, working through a clunky inventory system held together with duct tape and blind stubbornness that should have been rebuilt years ago. Because my mind is undisciplined and childish, this means I spend at least as much time wandering the twisted side streets of the internet as I do sorting through my inbox and spreadsheets. Even these frequent breaks might be useful were I taking them to read deep, or to explore the resources of the myriad organizations devoted to supporting small business. But of course, I do nothing so practical. It's social media and skimmed op-eds, late night comedy clips and back to social media. I emerge from these lost days bleary eyed and attention shot, craving prose that my mind is too scattered to take in and long walks long after the sun has set. How do you stand steady under the magnetic pull of ever-accessible media? "It's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention," the poet-essayist, Mark Strand, once wrote. I want to pay attention. I want to always live a three-dimensional life. Sophie Owner | Baker And now, to business. For those who aren't signed up for a Winter Bread Subscription, or who want additional loaves, I'm baking Red & White, Mountain Rye, Pain de Méteil, and Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies to order next week. The Méteil was a staple bread in the days before roller-milled wheat flour consumed French baking. It is half wheat, half rye (méteil means meslin, a rather esoteric term for a mix of rye and wheat), and is leavened with both wheat and rye sours for a deep, complex flavor. It is often paired with hearty foods like coq au vin or strong cheese.
We're half way through the Winter Bread Subscription, which means it's almost time to start signing up for the Spring Bread Subscription! If you have any feedback on this first round or are interested in pulling together neighbors or coworkers to create your own pickup location next time around, I'd love to hear from you. And finally, looking past spring and into summer, I'm starting to put out feelers for a bread lover/salesperson to work the Wednesday farmers market for me next June-August. If you're interested, or know someone who might be, let's talk. Dear Bread Eaters, During the month of February (and perhaps beyond) a portion of my profits will go to community organizations working for justice and sustainability here in Bellingham. If you have thoughts about which organizations in our community are doing the best work, shoot me an email, or stop by to chat at the next Saturday Farmers Market on the 18th. If you're already signed up for a winter bread share, thank you! I'm so glad you're a part of this bread subscription experiment. You can, of course, still buy cookies, add bread to your order, or just come visit me at the market. And if you're not part of the winter bread subscription, order bread! Order your Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies for Valentines day! And definitely come to market on the third Saturday of the month. I am trying to make democracy a habit, like feeding my sourdough. You know, get up in the morning, put on the kettle for tea, brush my teeth, feed the sourdough, and call my representatives. Some days I do better than others. I have always read voraciously, though never fast enough. Books wash up against the shore of my bed in ever-growing drifts, even as I request others from the library and am drawn as inevitably as the tide into used bookstores to gather more. I stack articles and essays along the top of my web browsers in neat rows like offerings, like a wall to hold back the rushing media on the days when keeping up with the news feels like drowning. Because I read so much, and not enough, I have always understood the vast expanse of my ignorance. For most of my politically-aware life, from that Sunday in middle school when I cried while reading the double page spread in the Seattle PI on the invasion of Iraq to the uneasy year spent following our most recent presidential election, my ignorance has been my excuse to stay quiet. What could I say that hadn't already been said elsewhere and better? It is hard to break a long habit of silence, but I'm holding on to the hope that it will get easier. Calling my reps is still uncomfortable--I have to practice what I want to say in my head beforehand or I lose the thread of my thoughts entirely--but the discomfort is there and gone so quickly that the anticipation is worse than the reality. Speaking out through the platform of my business demands greater commitment because it invites conversation, praise, and some very pointed condemnation. But as I told one former customer who wrote to express her disgust at my mixing of bread and politics, this business has always been political. My commitment to biking, to sourcing ethical ingredients, to minimizing packaging, to taking the long way even when shortcuts beckon, these are moral and political decisions. Stenciling vulvas, or anarcho-feminist fists, or Bread Without Borders on my loaves is just a more overt expression of those quieter values. Thank you for supporting me as I continue to define the shape of this business. I hope you will continue to come for the bread and stay for conversation. Tell me what you like. Tell me when you disagree. I may not change my mind, but I will listen.
Sophie Owner | Baker |
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