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This time of year, without the market to meter my weeks, time goes fluid. Work days and rest days overlap and trade places. There is always more to do but no one besides myself to note its doing. Bake days, with their set schedule and clearly defined goals—this many bags stamped and labeled, this many loaves mixed and baked—are a welcome escape into order and external accountability. A weekend spent clearing the garden of last year’s debris in preparation for spring is even more tangibly satisfying. Soon enough the market will resume and I’ll be wishing for the freedom of winter, but for now I wander between work and leisure, feeling vaguely guilty about the hours wasted in between. So it goes, slow season to busy, and always looking forward to the change ahead.   Speaking of the coming season, Raven Breads is hiring for the Saturday market and the bakery. These two part-time jobs start in April and could be combined by the right person into a single position. If you like bread and bicycles and want to be part of this little business as it grows, check out the job descriptions HERE. Sophie Owner | Baker This is the last day to subscribe to the remaining weeks of the WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION, though you'll still be able to order single loaves going forward. Baker's Choice Subscription: March 4: Alpine Spice Rye March 11: Rye & Oat March 18: Korn Rye or Corn Rye? March 25: Westphalian Pumpernickel “What’s your favorite fruit?” you asked me. I stuttered and stalled. My favorite fruit? How could I ever choose just one? But I have an answer now: satsumas. If I had a box I would sit down right here and eat them all, one after another, the peels scattered like petals on the floor around me, till my teeth felt matte and my tongue stung with the acid. Yesterday at the store I bought only a foolish handful, and ate them all standing at the end of the checkout line, waiting for the cashier to weigh up the rest of my groceries. Next week, when these firm haychiya soften and glow jewel orange against the light, my answer will be persimmon. And at the end of the long, fruitless spring, when the first tiny strawberries appear at market, how could I not love them best? But apricots. But mangoes sucked down to loose skin under the equatorial sun, and that first real banana, creamy and fragrant like no Cavendish I’d ever tasted. But blueberries by the fistful. But dense, floral apples and sun-hot figs. But Himalayan blackberries that smell like all the cracked sidewalk summers of my childhood. I’ve loved each, loved the soft hard heavy feel of them, loved breathing in their taste as it opened on my tongue, loved their colors and the textures of their skin. And is my love less for being so bright and brief, for turning as the seasons turn so that it always faces this moment, now, and the perfect fruit I’m holding in my hand? Sophie Owner | Baker This is the second to last market of the year! We'll be closed from Dec 22 until the Winter Bread Subscription starts up on Jan 22. Place orders for the last market ONLINE with a credit card or at MARKET with cash or check. Preorders (menu listed below) are due by TOMORROW for pickup at the last market, Saturday, Dec 21 HOLIDAY SWEETS Gingerbread Bundt Chocolate Babka Pain d'Epices (made with honey, rye, and spices, mixed and aged for 18 months!! to deep, sweet complexity.) Hazelnut & Oat Snowballs Apple Oat Scones. Plus Malted Chocolate Chip, Bittersweet Chocolate, Gingersnap, and Shortbread Cookies. FILL YOUR PANTRY! Red & White (1.5 kg) Mountain Rye (2.3 kg) Vollkornbrot (2.3 kg) Seedy Buckwheat (1.3 kg) WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Every Wednesday for 10 weeks, Jan 22 - March 25 Pickup in Birchwood, Downtown, or in Fairhaven 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! TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Mountain Rye Vollkornbrot Seedy Buckwheat CHOCOLATE BABKA Malted Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Gingersnap Cookie Hazelnut Snowballs Apple Scone Gingerbread Cake Shortbread Buckwheat Crisps PAIN d'EPICES I'll be donating 10% of sales this month to organizations working for social and environmental justice. Last Sunday we climbed above treeline and into the dusty blue of high mountain sunshine where the larches blazed orange gold and Cascade blueberries lit the hillsides in red fire. Just below Maple Pass, the mountains around us alive with light, another hiker let out a wild whoop, and the mountains echoed back his joy. We need a language of place, I think, to speak the wonder of this landscape. A verb for the way the late autumn sun backlights turning leaves. Another for the blue fading of mountains, each line of peaks paler than the one before till they disappear into the sky. I want a word for the sudden temperature change when you walk from sunshine into shadow, and one for the pockets of cool air held in low, damp places. What is the word for stones sunk into frost heaved ground, for the lacy trim of ice crystals along the edges of leaves, for the way bare branches rimmed in ice glitter in low sunlight? In his beautiful, demanding book on the importance of landscape language, Robert Macfarlane writes, "by instrumentalizing nature, linguistically and operationally, we've largely stunned the earth out of wonder. Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it. The contours and colors of words are inseparable from the feelings we create in relation to situations, to others, and to places." If we spoke the language of the mountains and sound, would we name the daily wonder of this place? Would we see our landscape more clearly, love it more deeply, and protect it more fiercely in a changing world?   TODAY AT MARKET Red & White Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookie Bittersweet Chocolate Cookie Oatmeal Scone Buckwheat Scone Gingerbread Brown Butter + Nibby Buckwheat Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION (Pick up bread every Wednesday Sept 5 - Nov 21. Sign up anytime.) Buckwheat & Honey Mountain Rye Today is the last day of summer, and it promises to be a decidedly unsummerlike day. I woke in the dark to the sound of wind, where a month ago I would have woken in the cool, white light of dawn. There’s rain in the forecast. For weeks I’ve been gathering in the last of the sun’s gifts: plums from the back alleys, rosemary from my grandmother’s garden, tomatoes, apples and pears, blue fenugreek, and grapes. The back porch is a chaos of canning supplies, dehydrators, harvest totes, dried herbs waiting to be stripped of leaves, dried flower heads waiting to be stripped of seeds, unripe tomatoes pulled reluctantly from the garden, fermenting crocks, and empty glass jars. This is the bulwark of flavor I build every year against the coming dark. See you soon. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + Oat & Honey Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Chocolate Malt Chocolate Chip Cookies Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies Harvest Cookies Oatmeal Scone Apple Cake Shortbread WEDNESDAY BREAD SUBSCRIPTION Blue Corn Nixtamal Mountain Rye This time of year, with the dark still a near memory, each new spring day is a surprise. Biking past trees in exuberant bloom, waking up to daylight, stepping out of the bakery after long, fluorescent hours into a bright evening, pressing seeds into the warm earth: each is a new delight. A ruby throated humming bird has laid claim to the rosemary in the back garden. He comes often. I hear him first: the whir of wings, a tiny cheep, and look up to see the irridescenct flash of his green head. And then he turns, or I do, and the sun catches him full in the throat, and he blazes. See you at market. Sophie Owner | Baker TODAY AT MARKET Red & White + Rosemary Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies Oatmeal Marmalade Scone Buckwheat Rhubarb Scone Black Sesame Buckheat Scone Shortbread PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/9 (place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup) Oat & Honey ($8) Mountain Rye ($7) Vollkornbrot ($8) PRE-ORDER for Mother's Day (place order by Thursday, pickup at the Saturday market) Scones, half dz ($24) And so the season ends. I'll be baking one last round of winter bread next week for pre-order and pickup, and then I'm taking off for a few weeks, before the market season and the next Bread Subscription begin. Throughout my early twenties, winter was my wandering season. For a month or three I'd travel the states by bike or plane, or I'd move to a foreign city and settle in to explore. That season, too, has ended. This bakery demands too much of my time to allow such wide wanderings. But a few weeks I can manage. I'll be back at the beginning of April, tired from being always an outsider in a foreign culture, but reluctant still to return to the comfort and easy familiarity of the Northwest. And that's the conundrum of travel, is it not? The farther you go, the more wonderful and strange it is to come home. BREAD MATTERS: Wednesday 3/14 CINNAMON TWIST ($8) Because who didn't love cinnamon sugar toast as a child? MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) There will be NO BREAD available between 3/14 and 4/4, when the SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION starts. The SPRING BREAD SUBSCRIPTION runs April - May. You can sign up ONLINEor download this FORM and mail it back with a check. BAKER's CHOICE subscription ($72) MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($63) VOLLKORNBROT subscription ($63) Raven Breads will be back at the SATURDAY FARMERS MARKET every weekend starting 4/7! Until next month,
Sophie Owner | Baker Already, I can feel the earth tilting towards summer. All across the lawn, the crocuses are punching up through the moss and grass, opening the closed fists of their flowers to the sun. Through the leaf mulch and dead stalks of cover crop, the first fava beans are uncurling in the garden. Soon, the daffodils will follow. When I walk the between the vegetable beds, mapping imagined crops with my stride, I daydream of delicate cotyledon and the first true leaves, of muddy knees and muddier boots, of weeds and rain and a riot of new-green growing up from the wet earth. No matter that yesterday I passed children skipping ice shards across frozen puddles as I walked downtown, my jacket zipped all the way to my throat, and my hands held close in my pockets. No matter that we still face five more months of rain. It’s almost time to plant the first peas and greens, to scatter poppy seeds, and tuck sweetpeas in along the fence line. The calendar may call this the depth of winter, but for me, February has always marked the beginning of spring.  Wednesday 2/14 CHOCOLATE ($10) A bittersweet black bread, with dark cocoa, Theo milk chocolate chunks, and candied orange peel. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/21 TOASTED SESAME ($8) Umami and crunch. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Wednesday 2/28 OAT & HONEY ($8) Sweet, tender, and perfect for toast. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker The year has turned. It is time to put the garden to bed. Already I've trimmed the thyme and hacked down the reaching arms of the oregano and sylvetta arugula. Red clover is coming up between the tomatoes. The winter's greens and root crops, planted in the blazing summer when rain was still a dream, are sturdy now, if still half-sized. The sunflowers crowded along the back fence are a glorious splatter of yellows and orange against the darkening sky. I've been reluctant to cut them down to dry for seed, and while I've lingered, admiring, the birds have delicately picked away at their faces, while the squirrels--always less mannerly--gobble them up and scattered their dry bones across the yard. I've been saving the easy seeds sporadically through the summer--poppy, calendula, sweet peas--but forgot in our short window of Indian Summer to pull in the old runner and pole beans, dried black on the vine. The hairy vetch and favas, supplanted in all but a few patches by the winter greens, are likewise soggy. Perhaps I can string up the long vines to dry in the sunroom, over the boxes of blushing, not-quite-ripe tomatoes. I love the garden this time of year, a little wild from summer neglect, and smelling of wet earth. In the winter the garden is a dream built of seed catalogs and graph paper; in the spring it is new green and hope; in the summer the garden is a cornucopia, spilling out into late evening dinner parties at the picnic table, and preserving projects that steam up the kitchen; now, in the fall, the garden is quiet. Not dead quiet, thinking quiet. There is time now to breath in the dirt and leaves, to stop and admire the bright bouquet of late flowers, volunteering beside the path, or the geometry of drying seed pods. In the spring and summer the garden is a product of my winter's planning, but the wild fall garden, it seems to me, belongs to itself. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Black Sesame Palmier Apple Tart Shortbread Granola Wednesday Preorder, due by Sunday night Harvest Rye: Apple + Hazelnut Mountain Rye Shortbread See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker 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. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Croissant, Cinnamon Roll, Danish Shortbread Granola LAST Wednesday Market Red, White, & Blue Cornbread Mountain Rye 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. |
