  On warm evenings we lash old fruit boxes to our bike racks and ride out. The city is ripe with summer. Tangled along alleys and trails, crawling over vacant lots, the Himalayan blackberries swell glossy black, their sweet, familiar scent rising up with the pavement’s sunheat, as nostalgic as the smells of lake algae and sunscreen. We wade into the thorns, cautious but unafraid. The green gage plums and the early apples are brightening yellow and beginning to drop. At first we catch the fruits by ones and threes with the wire fruit picker, but soon enough we’re shaking the branches and gathering up handfuls, only a little bruised, from the grass. Beside parking lots and back gardens we scramble up fig trees, clinging to the smooth branches with feet and crooked knees as we reach for the swollen syconia, breaking them off gently and passing them down hand to hand. By the time we drop down ourselves the tender skin of our necks and knees is burned red from the tree’s sap. Dusk has fallen. We load up and ride for home, skin itching, socks pricked through with thorns, mouths stained sweet purple, and our boxes piled high with the summer harvest. 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 with Blackberries & Plums Gleaner Slab Pie with Blackberries, Rhubarb, & Plums Savory Tomato Tart Shortbread Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: FARMER RYE with my own version of Brotgewürz with caraway, coriander, anise, fennel, and blue fenugreek. Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25  (a little) Help Wanted: I quite like crawling out of my kitchen cave once a week to see your friendly faces, and also, I haven’t slept in the mountains since I started the bakery five years ago. I’m looking for a cheerful, bread-loving cyclist to take over the weekly Saturday market. Knowledge of fermentation or farming would be useful, but isn’t necessary. The abilities to work quickly, stack a balanced load, and talk enthusiastically about good food are essential. I’ll put together an official job posting next week, but in the meantime, does this describe you or someone you know? Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Herb Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Blackberry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: POLENTA Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25 All along the top dock lines ran from the railing down to colorful floats, disappearing into the opaque water. The sky was scudded with clouds and hazy, so that the blue water and the blue sky and the blue islands were soft and dreamy like a watercolor painting. Bicycles passed, weaving between pedestrians. Families strolled by with children and small dogs, laughing in Spanish too quick for me to understand. A man rowed up in a tiny wooden dingy with a giant poodle riding the prow and the two of them followed the laughing families up and away. Children climbed onto the high railing, posing till parents or passersby took notice, before flinging their bodies out between the floats. The dock was cheerful and alive in the golden light of evening. A man walked up from the floating dock holding a fish by the gills, trailed by a round little girl in a startlingly hot pink bikini. I didn’t understand what he held till he dropped the dogfish onto the dock. It fought the concrete, trying to swim the air, gasping. The child crouched beside it, poking the shark back onto its bloody belly when it rolled. The man stood over her, arms crossed, while other men walked over to admire the catch and take pictures with their cell phones. “Will you eat it?” someone asked, curious and slightly appalled. “No,” the little girl answered, laughing, "of course not." When the shark finally stilled the man toed it straight and walked back to his line. My friend and I watched this small, casual violence from the same bench where we had sat, sunning dry after a swim, talking about small things and watching the clouds and the families and the man rowing his poodle across the bay. We tried to turn away. We tried to turn back to our conversation. But in the end we looked on in silence. When the man left, we stood and picked up our shoes. The round little girl in her hot pink bikini was still crouched by the dead shark when we walked away. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Potato Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread All Berry Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: TOASTED SESAME Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25  We went into the mountains, walking through forest, across alpine meadows, and up onto the high heather. On the knob of Yellow Aster Butte I turned and turned: Baker and Shuksan were hazy to the south, the teeth of the Skagit Range to the east, and just across the valley America Border Peak rose sharp and rust stained from Tomyhoi Lake. Below the butte we followed crisscrossing desire lines to the deepest of the alpine lakes and dove into the clear, cold water. Afterward, we lay quiet on the rocks like sunning snakes. I came down from the mountains brighter, my mind clear as the lake water. I was made of muscle and bone and wonder. Love for the land, for my Northwestern home, expanded in my chest, squeezing worry and self-doubt and the anxiety of Sisyphusian to-do lists down to their small and proper size. After the mountains, the city felt flat and slightly unreal. Inside the boxes of buildings there was no sky, no wind, no rain squalls, no air. Outside the walls, asphalt and turf grass hid the earth. The visceral wonder that had filled me softened and settled into memory. Worries and doubts grew back into the spaces it left behind. Under the bright, fluorescent lights of the kitchen I felt my mountain brightness dimming. At the end of a long day of baking, hungry for the sky, I took my dinner out back behind the house and sat on top of the picnic table facing the garden. The garden is fenced with fishing nets we salvaged from a net dumpster at the marina and hung like a shower curtain on wire stapled between scrap wood posts. The first fence we built was eight feet at the corners, sagging to six at the nadir of the wire’s parabola. All last summer and fall we found hoof prints postholing through newly planted beds. One morning I walked out to find the bean vines stripped naked, all the leaves bitten away. This spring we rehung the net ten feet high at the corners. The beans are lush with leaves and red flowers. I admired the riot of flowers as the light faded: the scarlet runner beans, the banks of volunteer borage and calendula, the cascading nasturtiums, and the sturdy sunflowers standing sentry over the beds. When I heard her steps in the dry grass I stilled, waiting. She passed ten feet in front of me. Every few steps she turned dark eyes and those big, expressive ears towards me, wary but unafraid. I didn't move. At the fence she stopped, nose to the net, gazing for long minutes into the feast of irrigated green. Mule deer are nearly as common as grey squirrels here at the edge of the city. She was unremarkable and very beautiful. The wonder swelled inside me. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Rosemary Potato Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Oat Scone Shortbread Blackberry Apricot Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: WILD & SEEDY Sign up for the LATE SUMMER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday, August 7 - September 25  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  “Why do you bike?” she asked me. The question shouldn’t have taken me by surprise, but it did. “Because I like to,” I replied, reaching out for more words and coming back empty-handed. The conversation moved on. As answers go, it was true enough, but thoroughly inadequate. Never mind noise and air pollution, never mind the costs of transit infrastructure and public health, never mind livable cities and public safety, never mind geopolitics and oil. Those are all good stories, true stories. I could have told any of them. Or I could have finished the story I’d begun, had I not gone mind-empty and tongue-tied. Here is the story: I like to bicycle. I like having half an hour inside the world and its weather, with the wind and sunshine and the driving rain against my face, with the sky opening above me and the smells of the city—woodsmoke, the chemical choke of fabric softener from a dryer vent, petrichor, cut grass, the bloom of night flowers, the secret wilderness of water and forest under the Dupont bridge—blowing by, even if I spend the rest of the day shut up inside a wood and concrete box. And I like the mechanical efficiency of cycling: the way muscle translates so effortlessly into speed. I like the freedom a bicycle’s speed and size gives me to explore off the city’s arteries and into the winding capillaries of the neighborhoods, with an eye out for pocket parks and abandoned fruit trees. I like the rush of descent, crouched low, waiting, waiting, waiting, faster, and braking just in time for the intersection. I like bicycling as a small, daily act of thanksgiving: for a body that is strong and capable, for the day, for the city, for the minutes between one task and another, when all I need to do is pedal and breath and watch out for homicidal drivers. 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: SPICED RING RYE!  I like waking up early to write these Saturday newsletters--truly, I do--but sometimes it's hard to convince myself of that when the first alarm rings, or the second. Sometimes the pull of sleep is too strong. This was one of those mornings. See you at market in a few hours! 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 Sour Cherry Rhubarb Slab Pie Wednesday bread this week: Red & White, Mountain Rye, Baker's Choice: Summer Garden  Sixty degrees and overcast: now this is proper Northwestern summer weather. The hot, clear days through April and May and early June were lovely, but felt foreign and vaguely ominous. When I was a child, it rained through the 4th of July. A hyperbole of memory, I'm sure, but how many parades did we shiver through during those island summers, watching the old cars and the floats roll past and scrambling for the saltwater taffy the riders tossed into the thin crowd? 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 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: FARMER RYE (a crackled rye boule with wheat, buckwheat, and corn!)  (accidentally candid self portrait on the loading dock because I lost track of the camera timer) After long hours cocooned in the fluorescent, time-warping glare of the commissary I stepped out onto the loading dock and woke up for the first time all day. There, for a few minutes, I had the low sun heating my back and the breeze against my skin. I had the sounds of traffic and sea gulls and the busker on the corner. Beneath the breeze I could smell the alley: sewer and garbage and the restaurant a few doors down. And suddenly I was close to tears, the grief caught in my throat as I held my breath against the pressure in my eyes. The whole day gone and I had missed it. A small grief, this lost day, but I stood with it for a moment longer, remembering to breath, remembering the feel and sight and taste of the outside, remembering the sun and the world turning, before I went back in to work. 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 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  I pull into the usual Skagit gas station twenty minutes early, park, drop the tailgate, and sit down to wait. Ten minutes later another truck pulls in beside me. Seth gets out, lifting a five gallon bucket from the bed as he walks over and thumping it onto the tailgate just as I stand. We make small talk for a few minutes—business, the warm spring—before I nod to the bucket and ask, “Blackberry?” “Yes,” he says, “from last year. The blackberries are blooming but the honey won’t be ready for a few months yet, and I sent all the maple out with the splits.” I always listen to his bee reports with interest, but this time I hear some of what he leaves unsaid, the assumed knowledge that experts can’t help but layer into their conversations when speaking on their favorite subjects. Hearing it makes me feel like an insider, self-satisfied and maybe a little smug, and I have to grab metaphorical hold of my tongue to stop myself from asking questions just to show off my understanding. I have all sorts of bee facts bumping around my head right now because I’m on my way home from the Honey Baking Summit: two days of lectures, tastings, and baking bench time at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. I was surprised to be invited to the Summit, and thoroughly flattered, though I tried to sound casual when I told people where I was going. “Oh, yes, just another trade group offering to fly me out to a gathering of top bakers, no big deal, happens all the time.” But it’s never happened before, and I’ve never been to an event like this: fully industry funded but free of hustle. I knew a few of the bakers personally and others by reputation. Raven Breads was far and away the smallest business represented, but bakers are are, for the most part, friendly, and there was too much I wanted to learn from them and from the instructors to allow myself shyness. So instead of listening quietly from the edges, as I’m always tempted to do in crowds of new people, I put on my extrovert mask, ill-fitting though it is, and stepped in to learn about honey. 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 Oat Scone Hazelnut Crumb Cake Shortbread Sign up for the Summer Bread Subscription, June 12- July 31 RED & WHITE Subscription $56 MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription $56 BAKER's CHOICE Subscription $64 |
