Late summer already, and in the cool days after the first rain I can feel fall pressing close. I went to pick blackberries, but the rain had washed out all their sweetness. Still, my walk brought me to a scrap of old orchard, caught between new houses and the bike path. There were apple trees scattering pale, early apples, a crabapple with squat, red fruit, and there, at the edge of the blackberries, two more trees, plums hanging like clutches of eggs among their dark leaves. I stood under the plum trees with a long stick and whacked at the branches till the fruit fell. (“Can I help you?” a neighbor called, walking into her garden. She looked suspicious. “I’m picking plums!” I called back, holding up a handful as proof. “Oh.” She turned away, reassured or disinterested, and went back inside before I could offer her the fruit.) The plums were almost past ripe, yellow-green bruising purple, and so soft that most split on impact. And they were sweet. Dripping, face-smearing, shirt-staining sweet. I hunted them through the long grass and brambles. When I lifted the crate, the juice ran down my legs.

See you soon.

Sophie
​Owner | Baker

I spent my first summer in college doing Environmental Restoration in the Cascades. I can’t remember now what I thought the work would be, but I remember being excited about the job, so I’m sure I didn’t imagine it was ten hour days spent clearing Himalayan blackberries. That’s what we did: every day we went out to battle the thorny monsters, armed with long loppers and polaskis. It seemed an impossible task—it was an impossible task!—but we fought on, unquestioning. All summer, my arms were a lacework of scratches. The scabs itched. Still, I gorged myself on berries.

When I was young, the eroded hillside across from our house in Seattle was a wall of Himalayan blackberries. The canes were always reaching out over the sidewalk, trying to gain a little more ground. We picked blackberries for breakfast, for pies, for eating where we stood, the fruit still warm from the sun. This is the memory that holds fast. Even now, with the hillside long cleared and the summer of Restoration still clear in my mind, the smell of blackberries is a sweet sense memory. Biking home last night from the bakery, the sun-hot scent reached out from the roadside and wrapped around me, and for a moment, I was a child again, picking blackberries in flipflops and shorts through the long, late evening, arms scratched, feet dirty, mouth sticky purple, heart full of sunshine.

See you soon.
​
Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + The Whole Garden
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies
Jam Scones
Fig Tarte Tatin
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Cookies, Scone, Shortbread, etc.

When I was born, my parents planted a tree. It was a leggy little Macoun scion on semi-dwarf rootstock, and they stuck it into the summer lawn of dandelions and dry grass, back by the chain link fence that separated our house from the neighbors'. Remarkably, it thrived. All the years of my childhood, as I tended vegetable beds and imaginary worlds in the back yard, it stood over me. In the summer, I picked the hard, green apples and carved them into tiny bowls for my fairy feasts, setting them alongside raspberry goblets and plates made of leaves. In the early fall, I scrambled up the tree to pick under-ripe apples, and weeks later, returned to gather wormy windfalls. These I dissected for my father's pies, carefully scooping out the bruises with the curved end of a potato peeler, before cutting out their rotten hearts.

The Macoun has become my Platonic apple ideal. It is a beautiful apple, blushed dusky purple over green, with dense, white flesh. It fits comfortably in hand, and has a satisfyingly tangy-sweet crunch. It makes good pies. When I look for apples for the bakery, weighing their density in my palm, pressing to feel for firmness or give, tasting for a little sour and bitter beneath the sweet, the Macoun, or perhaps my memory of it, is my guide.

The back fence is now wood, and half hidden by a riot of dark-leafed perennials. The rest of the seedy lawn was long ago paved over with a patio, or turned to make way for more vegetable beds. The trees in the neighbors' yards have grown, as trees do, making a living wall to either side and giving the garden something of the feel of a forest glade, hidden away from the concrete and sirens of the city. And at the center, despite years of alternating neglect and over-pruning, my Macoun still stands, reaching its watersprouts towards the retreating sun.

​I have a limited market lineup today because I figured a lot of you are probably still too full from Thanksgiving to think about baked goods. If you've recovered from your tryptophan-induced stupor, come early to get your bread and pastry before they sell out!

​Saturday Market
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot
Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies
Gingerbread
Shortbread
Granola

Wednesday Preorder
Wild & Seedy (again- because it's my favorite)
Mountain Rye
Shortbread
Gingerbread

​See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

POSTSCRIPT: I went to see Dave Montgomery speak at Village Books last month. He's a UW geomorphologist and who looks like The Dude and won a MacArthur for his side project writing about ag soils. His latest book, Growing the Revolution, falls in scope between Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which took a birds eye view of agricultural erosion over millennia, and The Hidden Half of Nature, which started an exploration of soil microbiology in his Seattle yard. Growing the Revolution makes a compelling case for conservation agriculture and for using soil health as the metric by which we measure good farming. His case studies span the globe and farming practices, from Kansas cash-cropping to Ghanaian slash and burn subsistance farming. And if that isn't enough to catch your interest, how about the fact that this is an optimistic book about the environment? You heard me right. I just used optimistic and environment in the same sentence without irony. Read it. ​

On the corner, the ground around the old apple tree is littered with fruit. The apples are a freckled yellow, and so mealy-soft they smear beneath my boots. Back home I cut out the bruises and toss the them into a saucepan, where they dissolve into a pale, pink sauce that I will use in the Country Rye.

The Italian plums are darkening purple, and the sun-baked scent of blackberries rises like a memory of my childhood summers from the thickets along the roadside. They smell like walking barefoot over the cracked city sidewalk, like lake swimming, like the Pop Goes the Weasel jangle of the ice cream truck weaving harmonies with police sirens, like scratched arms and sticky hands and pie for breakfast.
​
These golden days are ripe to bursting, the city and fields pregnant with summer sun, even as the nights cool and the light gentles. The rain has not yet returned. It is my favorite time of year.

Today is my birthday, and like every saturday, I’ll spend it selling bread at the market and admiring the sky. Come by for a loaf, or to sign up for the Fall Bread Subscription that starts up in a week and a half.

​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.)

Whether or not you've done a cleanse. or taken diet advice from Instagram, this smart disection of Clean Eating from The Gaurdian is worth your time. You already know how I feel about fad diets, so the fact that I'm skepticle of this one will come as no surprise, but even I, a born and bred contrarian, had to acknowledge as I read that I've unthinkingly adopted any number of ideas from our latest dietary obsession.

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.