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This essay is adapted from a 2017 newsletter.  When I was a child, I saw the magic at work in everything. The door between the physical and imagined was open and the world was full of wonder. There was little difference between the magic of tide pools, methodically explored in Tevas and fleece on an overcast afternoon, laminated species key in hand, and the magic of a backyard fairyland, where I might spend equally serious hours exploring the fairy kingdom and serving feasts from the garden in raspberry goblets and bowls carved from hard, green apples. I found worlds in the secret colors inside clam shells, in the geode's prickly center, in the lush abstractions of Georgia O'Keefe's erotic flowers, which I carried in a pocket-sized art book that must have come from a museum gift shop. I kept beach stones and horse chestnuts for pets.
But, of course, I grew up. In biology and physics classrooms we learned beautiful theories, but never spoke of wonder. In English class we read fiction, but wrote only critical essays. Each subject in turn closed its door on imagination. I learned many things in school, but forgot magic. Looking the other day at the wild topography of the rye breads, I felt an upwelling of the old wonder. The loaves cooling on the rack before me were as beautiful as any purple-hearted clam shell. They were made with intellect—with a practical understanding of temperature and time, of enzymes, yeast, and bacteria—and with the visceral knowledge of long practice. Science and intuition, fact and metaphor, both. Bread baking, I thought, might be a kind of practical magic. Sophie Owner | Baker A good morning. Pale blue sky and the clouds back lit to the east. Crows fly by by the dozen, winging south. The maple outside the window is green gold. I have a book for every mood and desire in stack next to me: a book on time and culture, on time and landscape, on wilding marginal agricultural land, on living deliberately, and on climate hope, plus a couple of paperback mysteries just for fun. You know the feeling when you’re just so pleased with the state of things it fills you up? I have a memory from childhood of lying under the covers with a flashlight long after bedtime, rereading a favorite book and being so overfull of self-satisfied pleasure—the secret of being up late, the swashbuckling adventure story, the warm bed on a cold night—I had to wiggle out my joy. Like that. Lots to worry about in the world, and I will, but right now I have a new day, a pile of good books, coffee brewing, and the promise of sunshine. I hope your morning is just as sweet. Sophie Owner | Baker  TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER 10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave BREAD: Red Wheat ($7.50 / 720g) Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 750g) Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g) Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g) Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g) SWEETS: Gingerbread Cake ($6-$16) Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2) Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2) Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies ($5 / 2) Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz) FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION / WEEKLY PREORDERS Order for the coming Wednesday or sign up for all the remaining Wednesdays through Dec 16. Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, Happy Valley/Fairhaven RED WHEAT Subscription - whole wheat table bread MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat TOAST Subscription - a new tinned loaf every week Nov 18 - Oat & Honey Nov 25 - Rosemary Cornmeal Dec - TBD All day in the bakery I listen to stories. I know the danger of living distracted. I recognize the contradiction of working divided, my hands in the dough and my mind far away, when I’m trying to build a business deeply rooted in place and time. But oh, the days are long and hard, and the kitchen is an unfriendly space, and I’ve always loved being read to. When I was a child my parents took turns reading to me before sleep. I was hungry for stories. “Keep reading,” I pleaded when they closed the book for the night. “Keep reading!” I ordered, imperious, spoiled, desperate to hear what happened next, even when I could barely keep my eyes open, even when I’d heard the story two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost knew it by heart. Twenty five years later and though the books are now audio files downloaded from the library, not spine-cracked paper, and I’m standing in the commissary kitchen, not tucked into a trundle bed, not much has changed. I’m tired from my scratchy eyes to the aching soles of my feet and it’s hours past dinner time, but still I fuss with one more task, kneeling to scrub that far grungy corner under the sink or squaring up the rolling racks just so. I’ve checked the burners and turned off the hood. My bike is leaning by the back door, panniers packed. Outside the sky is darkening, and if I hurry I might catch pastel end of sunset. But oh, I want so badly to hear what happens next, even when home and dinner are waiting, even when I’ve listened to the book two or six or a dozen times before, even when I almost know it by heart. 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 Three Plum Cake Gleaner's Apple Pie Shortbread This week in the Bread Subscription Red & White Mountain Rye Baker's Choice: Milk & Oat  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!) 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. I used to build forts in these woods. Sometimes, they were only sketches: this stump is the table; that red cedar is the wall; the front door is here, between two stones; those bits of sea glass, smooth beach rocks veined with pink and green, feathers, and drying seed pods lined up along the log are my treasures. I always walked in the front door. Other times the forts were more solid, like the lean-to I built against the upended roots of a toppled fir. I stole sheets of moss from the forest floor, and laid them over the slanted roof, hoping they would grow over the whole structure.  The problem with forts, whether built in the forest, or in the living room with curtains and couch pillows, or piled from driftwood, or tunneled into deep snow, is that all the pleasure is in the building. Once you’re done, you have a dark cave of some sort. Often, it’s rather damp, and maybe your knees are wet from kneeling to line up stones along the invisible interior walls, and it’s probably raining (in my memory of childhood summers, it always rained through the 4th of July), and breakfast was a long time ago. For hours and hours you’ve worked with intense, imagination-fueled focus, unheeding of the damp creeping up from the wet hems of your sleeves, caught up fully in the wonder of your creation. Only now, with the construction complete, does your concentration waver. Maybe you crawl inside the lean-to and sit for a minute, looking around in the dim light at the mud and sticks, and the little treasures tucked into the tree roots' crooked fingers, while the wet drips down your hair and inside your shirt collar. Maybe you fuss for a minute more, moving things just so, but the purpose is gone. So you crawl out again, and thrash your way back through the woods, and home for lunch. 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) Wednesday 3/7 MÉTEIL ($8) A beautifully crackled rye/wheat country bread. MOUNTAIN RYE ($7) VOLLKORNBROT ($8) Sophie Owner | Baker P.S. The monthly winter farmers market is today! Raven Breads won't be there, but you should still go and wander through the Market Depot, if only to give yourself a good reason to leave the house on this rather damp Saturday.
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. 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. When I was a child, I saw the magic at work in everything. The world was full of wonder, and the space between the physical and imagined was slim. There was little difference between the magic of tide pools, methodically explored in Tevas and fleece on an overcast afternoon, laminated species key in hand, and the magic of a backyard fairy land, where I might spend equally serious hours exploring the fairy kingdom and laying out offerings of flowers and tiny feasts in bowls carved from hard, green apples. I discovered worlds in the secret colors inside clam shells, in a geode's prickly center, in the lush abstractions of Georgia O'Keefe's erotic flowers, which I carried in a pocket-sized art book someone must have picked up at a museum gift shop. I kept beach stones and horse chestnuts for pets. But, of course, I grew up. In biology and physics classrooms, we learned the most beautiful theories, but never spoke of wonder. In English class, we read fiction, but wrote only critical essays. In turn, each subject closed its door on imagination. I learned many things in school, but forgot magic. Looking yesterday at the wild topography of the rye breads, I felt a sudden upwelling of nostalgia. The boules cooling on the rack before me were as beautiful as any purple-hearted clam shell. What stories might they hold? But it was a foolish question. If there are stories in my loaves, I will never find them now, grown up and educated as I am. And so I shook away the unsettling sense of loss and returned to my work. Saturday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Nibby Chocolate & Hazelnut Sandwich Cookies Cardamom Rolls and Cinnamon Rolls Polenta Cake Granola Wednesday Market Red & White, Mountain Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies Rolls of some variety Possibly something with strawberries Granola See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Marilynne Robinson asked in my ear. I stopped, elbow deep in the dough, because it was, I realized, the very question I ask myself every day in a dozen different ways. It is the heart of small, everyday decisions about how to move through the world, and large, existential decisions about work and place and community. Who do I want to be, and how do I live as that better self? And then the forward march of Robinson's powerful mind and the immediacy of the task in front of me pulled me back into motion. Sometimes someone else articulates a thought or feeling you didn't know you had until you heard it said, and then it's so obvious, so fundamental, that you cannot imagine it unknown. We live much of our lives feeling alone in ourselves, even when surrounded by other people. The reminder that we are never truly alone, that someone else in the world, or many someones, holds in themselves the same experience, can come with a profound sense of recognition. It is a beautiful intimacy, to be so connected, even if it is across satellites, over centuries, or though the pages of a book. When I was young I was baffled by the singularity of being myself. Why am I only this girl, and no one else? I asked. It seemed to me that I might just as easily wake up tomorrow in another mind and body. A soul was such an essential thing to be tied forever to so ephemeral and mundane a vessel (though of course I understood this in much simpler terms—if only I had kept a journal at eight!). This was also a time when I thought often about death—my own—with great curiosity and no fear. It was certainly the most mystic period of my life, in those early days of self-consciousness, when I could not understand myself separate from the universe, before I learned the designated boundaries of self and mind. And why, I wonder, did the adult world feel it so imperative to teach me those boundaries? Why did they insist I learn to be alone? Perhaps when I reach for poets like William Stafford and Mary Oliver, when reading Wendell Berry fills me so deep with joy and grief that the familiar words bring me to tears, I am reaching also for this forgotten understanding of myself in the world. I read a psychology paper sometime early in my undergraduate arguing that we cannot have complex feelings without the words to articulate them. At the time we were also reading about deaf children raised without sign language, and the idea that their lack of language might leave them trapped not only in literal but also in mental silence was so hurtful that I wanted to reject the entire field of cognitive linguistics out of hand. Now, looking at the way that words have shaped my understanding of myself, I find the hypothesis compelling. How do we know who we are, except by how we live? Or maybe, how do we decide how to live, except by defining ourselves? At Market Today Red & White, Mountain Rye, Vollkornbrot, Country Rye Bittersweet Chocolate and Malted Chocolate Chip Cookies S'mores on Nibby Chocolate Wafers Cardamom, Dark Chocolate, and Raspberry Rolls Rhubarb Polenta Upside Down Cake Granola Preorder Wednesday Pickup Red & White Mountain Rye Cinnamon Raisin Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies See you soon!
Sophie Owner | Baker |