I watched the trees outside the window bend and sway as I stuffed my pannier with extra layers and water for the ride to the farm. It was my last delivery of the year. The wind had been blowing hard from the southeast all day. Just that morning the headwind had turned my southbound delivery route around the bay from an easy, flat ride into what felt like a five mile hill climb. Still, what was the point of an e-assist bicycle if not to assist with adverse conditions like these? I strapped the box of bread to the front deck, hung my pannier on the back rack, and rode out in defiance of the wind

I rode through the city under fast, gray skies, through the forest with the treetops swaying and the breeze gentle around me. I wound the tight curves south of Larabee, bedrock rising to my left and falling away to my right, the sun breaking clear above the islands and glazing the water below shining white. I rode past water falling white and fast into culverts, past the mud streaks of small landslides, past rockfalls, past a giant cedar snag nose down beside the road, a long skid like a sled run streaking the hillside above it. The bare branches of the maples stood out bright against the firs. Madronas blazed up from the rock, red and yellow and shining green.

Out from the protection of the hills the Skagit flats were as bad as I’d imagined. The wind picked up as the sun set, head on and getting colder. I distracted myself with birds. Red tail, red tail, starlings, red tail. Sea gulls floated in the flooded fields. A heron lifted off from just beside the road, awkward and startlingly large. Somewhere to my right I could hear geese—dozens? hundreds?—calling as they settled for the night. I was so tired I was blinking in and out of sleep even as my legs kept pumping. Five miles to go, and then two. I stopped to pull on another layer, heavier gloves, to drink water hoping it would wash the sleep from my eyes. Every mile was slower than the one before. I crossed the Samish and turned east. The wind punched me in the side and sent me wavering. I stared straight ahead at the road, at the dark clouds massed over the foothills. Pushed and pushed and I was at the farm. I abandoned the bike in the middle of the farm road and went straight inside. What was usually a ninety minute ride, motorless, had taken me nearly two and a half hours with the electric assist. E was gone on deliveries. I didn't care. I tore off a hunk of bread and spread it thick with butter. Ate it and I tore another, and two more after that. I finished the dried apricots in the tin above the sink. I boiled water and filled a mug, wrapped myself in a quilt, and drank it slowly. I was cold and exhausted and so grateful for walls and slippers, for the mug warming my hands, for stillness.

It was a good ride. Hard and good. I was glad for the ride and glad it was over, or I was glad for the year of baking and glad it was over, or I was just glad to be sitting down, warming up with the hot water and food. I was glad. And then I was asleep.

Happy winter.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

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

I took the long way home. The night was wet and so warm I rolled my sleeves up above the elbow and undid the buttons at my neck while I waited at a stoplight. After the day’s heat, scents bloomed in the light rain. I rode open mouthed, tasting the city on my tongue. I wanted to remember each night smell, I wanted to find the adjectives and metaphors to hold them, but they were subtle and I was moving too fast. Between one breath and the next, they changed and were gone.

See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Herb & Olive Oil
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Shortbread
Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie

Wednesday bread this week:
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: MILK & HONEY

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Herb & Olive Oil
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Shortbread
Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie

Wednesday bread this week:
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: SPICED RING RYE!

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Herb & Olive Oil
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Oat Scone
Shortbread
Strawberry Rhubarb Slab Pie! (though I don't know how this will hold up in pastry bags. BYO bowl and fork, perhaps?)


Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription through July 31
RED & WHITE Subscription $49
MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $49
BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $56

Wednesday bread this week:
Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Polenta

Despite all indications to the contrary (namely, my laughably financially insecure profession), I’m not a risk taker. I’m obnoxiously frugal. I look before I leap. Often, I look for so long that from the outside the leap looks impulsive. From the inside, though, it’s the only remaining option.

For years, I rolled with the long bake days. If the orders spiked and I had to spend sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours in the kitchen, I did. Sure, it sucked, but with tea and snacks and maybe a nap on the grungy floor, I could make it through. I even felt a kind of stupid pride in my endurance. By last year, though, I was getting tired. It wasn’t enough to push through the week and sleep on Sunday. The bakery was supposed to be work. Work that I liked, certainly, maybe even work that I loved, but not my reason for existence. I was sliding dangerously close to burnout and I was too exhausted to do anything about it.

I had my first sixteen hour day in months last Tuesday. By the end I was aching and tired, but I wasn’t resigned. “No fucking way am I getting into this again,” I thought, and went on Craigslist to buy the first used oven I could find that would stack with the oven I bake in now. The newest addition to the mangy herd of ranges and ovens crowded under the Type 1 hood in the commissary isn’t a deck oven, of course. It isn’t even a combi. It’s just another fan-on-all-the-time American Range convection oven. But honestly, when I bought it, I didn’t think about long term equipment investments or the hassle of reselling it when I move out of the commissary. I didn’t think about amortization or margins. I’ve calculated and recalculated those equations, and in the end when I thought about my sore feet, about the production bottleneck at the oven, about how much I hate working through dinner, they didn’t matter. I leapt.
See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

P.S. I'm not actually sure how I'm going to take these two 680lb ovens off their stands and stack them together. If you have expertise in moving heavy objects, or just good lifting form and some free time Monday, I'd love help solving this rather daunting puzzle.

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White
Rosemary
Mountain Rye
Vollkornbrot
Seedy Buckwheat

Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie
Gingersnap
Oat Scone
Hazelnut Crumb Cake
Shortbread

ORDER ONLINE:
Wednesday's BAKER's CHOICE: Raisin Honey Rye
Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31

I won’t always write about walking. As summer approaches the work begins to tighten around my days, squeezing out the spare hours till moving through the world becomes purely functional: cycling for transportation, running for exercise, driving for hauling impossible loads or covering impossible distances. Then I’ll write about baking, or cycling, or perhaps running. But now, in the slow heart of winter, I have time to walk.

The time I take to walk without direction is often the truest part of my day. The chores and routine work, the hours absorbed by the blue glow of my screens, the casual interactions with friends and strangers, these so easily blur till the days slip by into unremembered months. Perhaps what I find in walking is the sort of moving meditation others seek in yoga or martial arts. Walking brings time into focus, makes me fully embodied and awake to my surroundings. Already, most of the hours I spent indoors yesterday are slipping from my memory, but I remember so well the yellow of the willow branches and the clean cut of snow against wet pebbles at the high tide line. I remember the cold of the wind and the heat of my body. I remember the sound of wings, and looking up to see crows silhouetted against the white blue sky, flying north.
​
Sophie
Owner | Baker

After the holidays, after the lights, the rooms warm with friends and family, after the gifts, after the tamales and pozole, the roast beef, ragu, and rugelach, the gingerbread and gingersnaps, after eating and eating and eating, I step out into the world. It’s mid afternoon. Damp cold. The sky mottled gray. I start slowly, moving awake after days glutted on food, books, and sleep. The muddy track along the lakeside is quiet. Under the car rumble, I can hear the waves lapping. They roll towards shore from two directions, crossing at a wide angle. Each facet of the water’s surface reflects a different sky. For a while, I stand watching the water, trying to catch the shifting pattern; it eludes me. I run on, under the gray sky, along the gray water, through the lowering dark. I cross a hillside of waterbirds probing the grass. The ducks lift off before me in waves. The geese keep eating, unperturbed.

I take the long stairs up from the lake two at a time. One flight after the next. I reach the top gasping, sweating, calves tingling, thighs trembling, face flushed, cold fingers fisted, feet fumbling for the last step. I am wholely alive. Every corner of my body is awake.

This is a gift I try to remember: legs and lungs that move me through the world, arms that lift and carry, hands as competent to mix dough as they are to hold a pen. I am glad to have work that demands mind and body both, glad too to live in a community whose support lets me turn that work into a livelihood. Thank you.

The bakery is growing steadily, straining the seams of the shoestring operation I’ve been running for the past four years. I have you to thank for that, as well. Because of that growth, I’ve been able to double my donations this year from one percent of sales to two percent. A small change, but a step in the right direction. And because of that growth, I’ll spend the winter planning how to build my bakery dreams into brick and mortar reality. I’ve passed enough hours staring out over the water, watching the light and writing stories in my head. It’s time to run.

Happy almost New Year.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​WEDNESDAY BREAD
Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Jan 2
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Broa Milho
Honey & Spice (pain d'epices)

WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
Sign up to get a loaf every Wedneday, January 2 - March 6
RED & WHITE subscription
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription
BAKER's CHOICE subscription: 10 weeks, 10 ryes

 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

​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...