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Snow in the northern shadows but the sunshine is dazzling clear and the pavement dry. There's a drainage pond to our left. "Stop!" I call up to C, who's riding a few yards ahead. "The geese are walking on water!" And my astonished delight is no less when I realize a breath later that the water is a sleek sheet of ice because the geese are skiing, breasts forward, necks tucked back, taking careful, gliding steps across the pond—step glide, step glide—their black feet spread wide. A mallard skis past, post-holing once in her rush to reach the ducks lapping the small, dark circle of water under the trees. And the biggest goose turns back, in a hurry now, or over-confident. His head comes a little forward. He leans towards shore. And just like an amateur skier bent forward into a rise, his feet slide backwards with each step. Step slip. Step slip. Going nowhere fast. Sophie Owner | Baker The WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts January 22 and runs for 10 weeks through March 25. Pickup in Birchwood (the front step), Downtown (Cafe Velo), or in Fairhaven (Shirlee Bird Cafe). Sign up ONLINE. RED & WHITE subscription ($70) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($70) BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($80) BAKER's CHOICE menu: all rye all winter long! 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! Until now, I’d always delivered to the front door of the restaurant. I’d lean my bike against one of the outdoor tables, open the trailer box, hoist two large bags of bread up into an awkward, two-arm hug, bang on the door with my elbow till the cook let me in, drop the bags on a table between the overturned chairs, and leave. Easy. But staff or schedules had changed. The restaurant was empty now on Wednesday mornings. I got directions to the basement delivery door and my own alarm code. No big deal, I thought. I could handle a change in routine. Around back, at the end of a dead end alley, I leaned my bike against a stack of kegs. The alley was empty but for me and two men drinking out of paper bags. I walked to the unmarked door, decided that perhaps this was a good place to lock my bike, walked back to my bike and locked the front wheel to the frame, walked back to the door, decided that I shouldn’t leave my pannier and helmet behind, turned back to the bike to retrieve them, returned to the door and, at last, opened it. Immediately, the alarm began to shrill. I fumbled right and then left for the light switch. It was taped over, damn it. Who tapes over the light switch in a windowless basement? The alarm was still shrieking at me. How long did I have? Finally, my hand hit a second switch. The fluorescent lights flickered on. I crossed the room quickly, scanning the walls for the alarm box. There, by the inside door. I entered my code. The noise stopped. My heart was beating too fast. I returned outside to my bike for the bread, hoisted the bags up in an awkward, two-arm hug, fumbled for the door handle, and found it locked. Bread back into the boxes, key out of my pocket, door unlocked and propped open with my pannier, bread bags hoisted and carried through the open door, pannier hooked with a blindly seeking foot, and I was in. The door slammed shut. I crossed the room, again, passing the blessedly silent alarm, fumbled open the far door, climbed the stairs (still hugging the bread), fumbled open another door, and I was in the empty restaurant. I walked to a table and dropped the bags between the overturned chairs. I had done it. But when I returned to the door at the top of the stairs I found it locked. I looked around, hopefully. The room was quiet and still entirely empty. I tried the basement door again. Definitely locked. There was nothing for it. I turned around and marched across the restaurant and out the front door. The front door started to swing shut behind me… and then it stuck. I pushed. It didn’t budge. I opened it again and tried to close it. The door jam was in the way. How was the door jam in the way? We wrestled back and forth, the door and I, until at last, with a heave, I triumphed. Now, at this point the reasonable thing to do would have been to walk around the block to the alley’s entrance, but I wasn’t feeling very reasonable. I scrambled over the patio wall instead, climbed carefully down the other side, picked my way across the blackberry thicket, and wiggled through the only gap in the chain link not sewn shut with barbed wire. I was in the alley, and, thank god, so was my bicycle. I went back into the basement one last time, rearmed the alarm, grabbed my pannier and helmet off the floor, and walked out, leaving the light on behind me. Sophie Owner | Baker THANKSGIVING ORDERS are up! Order today at market with cash or check or online with a credit card by Wednesday, Nov 20. Pickup Wednesday, Nov 27, downtown (exact location TBD) Sweets: Apple Cake - because it's my favorite and should be yours, too. Rye, buckwheat, and heirloom apples. 78% Whatcom grown by weight. Gingerbread Bundt - in all its dark and sticky glory. Breads: Rosemary Rolls - with a little toasted corn & olive oil Red & White - for a large or larger table bread Roasted Potato & Garlic - 100% Washington grown (except the salt) Harvest Miche - of wheat, rye, buckwheat, & corn  (I wish I had beautiful product photos of the Thanksgiving offerings to show you, but I never remember to make sample product to photograph beforehand, and, let's be honest, I probably wouldn't get around to it even if I did remember, so here's a sampler of the regular market treats and their grains instead) TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Cookie Apple Marmalade Oat Scone Gingerbread Cake Apple Cake with Cultured Cream Orange Cardamom Bread Pudding Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 5 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, CIDER RYE I left the kitchen just after seven last Monday. Riding towards home I caught slices of a sky melted apricot yellow between the buildings. The color was luminous and deep. I changed course, rode hard towards Squalicum, hoping to catch the color, hoping as the desire knotted under my collar bone and tightened my throat. I was too slow. By the time I stopped above the beach the sunset had settled into a lovely, unsurprising orange. I stayed anyways, leaning against my bike, watching the sunset and the crescent moon, watching the silhouettes of herons flying north and the colors reflected in the glassy bay, till a jetski revving loops across the bright water and the brittle music playing from a cell phone down the beach drove me away. I would be earlier next time, I decided. I would go down to the water to watch the sunset every day the sky was clear. But I didn’t. I worked late all week. I rode home in the dark. Celina will be working the market today, but I might see you when I stop by to shop. 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 Gingerbread Cake Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION 11 weeks remaining Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18 Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, Farmer Rye  “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!  It took years, but eventually bread killed my bike. Ok, that’s exaggeration. But bread lamed my bike badly. I was riding my work bike a few months ago—the one I use to haul those ridiculous trailer loads to market—and looked down to see a distinct wobble in my back wheel. Being an indifferent bike mechanic, and a busy baker, I dropped the bike off at the bicycle cafe for a truing. But by mid-afternoon, Andrew, the mechanic, had called to say the wheel was a loss. The metal of those shiny aluminum spoke nipples, once the height of bicycle fashion, was too soft to turn. There was no righting this wheel. I’d have to buy another. So of course, I rode away and forgot about my wonky wheel, except on Saturday mornings when I loaded up the market trailer, and would glance down with apprehension, imagining it flattening suddenly under the weight of all that bread. A foolish imagining, but I couldn't shake it. (Though I’ve started breaking the market load into two trips, until recently I hauled it all in one precarious load, with a trailer weight of approximately 345 lbs. When you add me into the equation, that means my little bicycle was carrying the equivalent of 3.5 bakers, or 214 large loaves of bread). Eventually, though, that weekly anxiety added up to a return trip to the bicycle cafe, this time for a new rear wheel. I pedaled over from the bakery on my road bike to pick up the work bike yesterday afternoon, while the oven was reheating between loads of bread. When I walked in, Andrew called me over eagerly. “Let me show you your old wheel!” He held it up, triumphant. “I’ve only seen this once before,” he told me, tracing a thin crack all the way around the inside of the rim. “Look!” he pointed to places where the crack had widened, whole chips of rim missing. When he spun the wheel, I could hear them rattling around inside. “It’s a good thing you got a new one! This one could have collapsed at any time.”  See you soon. Sophie TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal + Red Berry Scone Buckwheat + Plum Scone Plum Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Wild & Seedy Mountain Rye 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 Can you ever be all the way outside in the city? Can you be outside when you stand on a concrete floor, walled in by buildings, with the roar of traffic ebbing and flooding like the tide, changing birdsong and your brain, and the the petro-smell of too many cars rising up from the roads with every warm rain? , Last night I rode home under a hot pink sunset, keeping one eye on the sky, the other on the cars and the boozy sidewalk crowds. The night was sound and color around me. I remembered other night rides. I remembered riding through the country night and feeling the air change. The hollows were cool damp, already collecting mist, and the night smells were as loud as the frog choruses: forest mulch and fir, nootka rose, dust, flowering clover and meadow grass, and the warm smell of the cattle. It made me feel so wildly alive, pedaling through the complicated dark, with only the shadows of the hedgerows to mark the road, and not a single headlight to break the night all the way home. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Buckwheat Strawberry Scone Rhubarb Strawberry Galette Shortbread WEDNESDAY MARKET Red & White Toasted Sesame Mountain Rye Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Scone, Shortbread, Galette I got on the eastbound ferry just before sunset yesterday afternoon. The wind, which that morning had sent me flying west on my bicycle, had died down to a stiff breeze. Beneath me the boat rumbled. I sat, brooding and watching the road of wake running back toward a bank of candy-colored clouds, and thinking about choice and necessity and compromise and the beauty of the sunset. I had gone to the islands to buy a truck, and now, after years of bicycles, buses, and borrowed cars, I was driving it home. How do you choose your ethical compromises? What are your hard lines? I think a lot about consumption: the what and why and how much of it. It is not a comfortable compulsion, to imagine the before and after of everything I buy. I mean, it would be nice, at the end of a long, hungry day, to look at a slice of pizza from the place on the corner and see dinner, rather than CAFOs, or the desolation of industrial agriculture in Northern Mexico, or the garbage islands clogging up our ocean gyres. Sometimes I wonder if the deep thought I put into even small acts of consumption is really just a bunch of self-indulgent navel gazing, or, worse yet, an outward facing expression of the same self-martyring impulse that drives our ascetic diet culture. Other times I worry that not buying the slice of pizza, or choosing to ride my bike instead of driving, or any of the other dozens of choices I make in the course of a day, are really just internal greenwashing. Like, how many ethical carrots would I actually need to eat in order to morally balance the savings I put in an unexamined, high-return mutual fund? How many miles would I have to bicycle to make up for the times I travel by air? But looking back at the darkening clouds, I decided that, at least for now, I can live with some imperfection and hypocrisy. Better, I think, to choose eyes open than to give in to paralyzing indecision, or to give up and sink blindly into a culture of endless consumption. Wednesday 1/31 BLUE CORN NIXTAMAL ($8) European bread meets Mesoamerican maize. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) 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) Happy eating!
Sophie Owner | Baker 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. I rode home from the kitchen last night chasing the edge of light. In front of me was a stripe of fading orange sky and the clouds were top lit, though their bellies were heavy with night. Behind me the clouds marched off in orderly rows into the dark. I felt like I might catch the sun, if only I rode a little faster. I was so busy looking up I nearly ran into the curb. Clouds can be dangerous that way. Today the sky is bright and empty, so perhaps I'll manage to keep my eyes on the road. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Country Rye with brotgewürz, apples, and whey Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Raspberry Lebni Tart Cardamom Roll Garden Pesto Twist Brown Butter Shortbread Granola Wednesday Market Red & White Mountain Rye Various Sweets See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker |
