All the way up I thought about the end of the world. The night before I’d stayed late deep cleaning the bakery and listening to Bill McKibbin talk about climate and capitalism. It was a hard story to hear. I worked till after one, went home to shower and sleep and dream apocalyptic dreams, biked my morning’s deliveries, and fled to the mountains.

All the way up I thought about neoliberalism and exploitation, about inequality and power, about the ocean become desert, about atmospheric oxygen dropping, about heat and fire, rising tides and rising floodwaters, the wild gone, the animals gone, the forests gone. When my grandchildren walk this path, I thought, the mountains will still be standing, but will the trees? Will the cedars, the firs, the hemlock and spruce? What of the willow thickets, the vine maples, the red alders with their leaves wet and gleaming in the soft light? The forest, with its carpet of new green, its mossy boulders and thick ferns, its orchids and trillium, its snowmelt streams falling in white ribbons down the mountainside, was so beautiful it broke my heart. We walked in the clouds. The birds were quiet. The rain fell soft against leaves and loud against our coats. Up we walked, and up. We were wet from hats to socks despite our Gortex. When I bent down to lift the face of an orchid, water streamed from my hood. For a moment, we could see the far ridgeline though the shifting mist and trees, and then it was gone again.

Somewhere up in the snowfields above treeline my mind quieted, though the climate grief remained, a familiar ache in my throat. It was colder in the open and we soon lost the trail. The snow was rotten with hidden streams. We turned and followed our footprints back to the wet, green forest. After a time the rain stopped. We walked down into sunlight.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER
10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave

BREAD:
Red & White ($7.50 / 720g)
Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g)
Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g)
Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 750g)
Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g)

SWEETS:
Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2)
Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2)
Rhubarb Snack Cake ($5)
Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz)
Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz)

SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
9 WEEKS REMAINING
Every Wednesday, June - August

Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven.
RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread.
MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread.
TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week.

Next WEDNESDAY PICKUP
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning.
Order by Sunday night.

Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: TOASTED CORN
Special guest: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE

Rye friends, I managed to collapse the entire batch of Vollkornbrot. I’m sorry! If you don’t want to wait till next Saturday, I’m adding Vollkorn to this Wednesday’s bake as well. Orders due by Sunday night. Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven. This also means I have 30% less bread today at market, so come early!

Quiet in the high meadows. We left the snowshoes strapped to our packs and walked out, skirting meltholes, watchful for rotten snow over the streams. The snow was wet and firm. We kicked upwards to the knob and sat to eat our lunch—sandwiches, an entire pound cake, a thermos of hot coffee—looking out at the dark firs, the shifting clouds, the brief glimpses of distant ridgeline, rocky and white and gone again.

Afterwards we boot-skied down the meadows and crossed back into the forest, down from the snow and clouds and back to earth. The roar of the Nooksack rose as we descended the switchbacks, and so did the light. By the time we reached the road the forest was aglow around us: the shining leaves of the vine maples, the bright, shaggy moss, the foxglove and columbine and little white flowers in exuberant bloom. Halfway down the service road I made E stop the truck so I could stand and stare at the dazzling green.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER
10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave

BREAD:
Red & White ($7.50 / 720g)
Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g)
Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g)
Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g)

SWEETS:
Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2)
Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2)
Raspberry Rhubarb Rye Snack Cake! ($5)
Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz)
Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz)

SUMMBER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
10 WEEKS REMAINING
Every Wednesday*, June - August
Pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, Fairhaven.
RED & WHITE Subscription - wholemeal wheat table bread.
MOUNTAIN RYE Subscription - seedy rye & wheat tinned bread.
TOAST Subscription - a new type of tinned wheat bread every week.

Next WEDNESDAY PICKUP
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning.
Order by Sunday night.

Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: BUCKWHEAT & MOLASSES
Special guest: VOLLKORNBROT

It’s harder on these overcast days. The house presses close, and the sky. But still, when I push the window open, creaking in its century-old frame, birdsong spills in. The peas are pressing up in the garden. Along the untended fenceline volunteer poppies, phacelia, and mullen vigorously disregard the lingering cold. Under the woody remains of last year’s growth, the herbs that died back over winter are unfurling: winter savory, oregano, lovage, echinacea, hyssop, and mint. Even the dandelions in the garden paths feel hopeful with their flower buds held close like fists, ready to punch into glorious yellow bloom.

Growing a garden is a solid sort of pleasure. It holds you to the earth, whether that earth is in a handful of pots on your apartment balcony or in a sprawling yard like ours. While the newscycle cries Armageddon and people walk around wearing latex gloves like talismans against evil, new life unfolds in the garden. As the days stretch toward summer, the garden stretches roots and leaves, flowers and fruits, untroubled by news and politics, untroubled by anything but the sun and soil and the the work of your hands. In a few weeks or months, you can eat that love and sunshine for dinner.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Garden resources:
Did you know Village Books is taking online orders? The two most dirt-stained and page-bent gardening books in my collection are Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guild and Steve Solomon’s Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, but they have many others besides.

The Community Food Coop carries a limited selection of seeds from Uprising and High Mowing. If the seed racks are as empty as the grocery shelves, you may need to look online. Uprising Seeds should, obviously, be your first stop since they’re right here in Whatcom. Other great Pacific Northwestern seed companies include: Adaptive Seeds, Siskiyou Seeds, Deep Harvest Farm, and Wild Garden Seed.

You may need to buy some of your own gardening tools, but more likely than not your neighbors have everything you’ll need. Perhaps, in this time of anxiety and isolation, community can grow alongside your garden.

Dear Bread Eaters, I need your help to make the self-serve pickups work. I had to refund nearly 10% of sales last week to customers who arrived to find their orders had been taken by someone else. I don’t want anyone walking home empty handed, nor can I afford the shrink when I’m facing down a second quarter of operating in the red. If you have suggestions for how to make the system (which currently consists of an order sheet with names and orders inside every box) easier to navigate and less error-prone, tell me, please!
- Sophie

How to get bread & pastry:
Place your order in the ONLINE STORE.
Self serve pickups every Wednesday in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Orders due by Sunday for pickup the following Wednesday.
Sign up by 3/29 for the 5 week April Bread Subscription.

Subscriptions:
RED & WHITE subscription - whole wheat sourdough
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription - seedy wheat & rye
TOAST subscription - a new tinned loaf every week, perfect for making buttered toast

This week’s bake:
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: Oat & Honey
Pastry: Cardamom Coffee Pound Cake + Gingersnap Cookies

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!

Getting towards dusk and the sky is a crow highway. They fly over in twos and twenties,
dropping south, wing-beating, gliding, dipping and rolling like ravens. They’re gathering at the old boat house where they strut and hop over the lawn, blacken the trees, fluff and shake in the shallows.

The sky is dream blue: pale and streaked white yellow purple with thin clouds. To the north and east, the mountains glow. The ducks are rafted up on the lake, the stragglers flying in low and hard, skidding to a bright spray stop on the water. There’s a single cormorant standing in black silhouette above a white buoy, and here, on the snag exposed by the winter-low water, a stiff-legged painted turtle immobilized by the cold.

All the way home I’m running against traffic, northbound as the crows fly south in the lowering dark.

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!

We will NOT BE AT MARKET today.

Order Mountain Rye, Red & White, or Baker's Choice  (this week it's a Finnish-inspired Black Bread!) online for Wednesday pickup.
​
See you at the market next Saturday.

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

,It’s been years since I’ve spent a day alone. Not without people alone, or at least, not only that. I mean alone without conversation, without books or screens or radio for company, without work. Often, the minutes of my bike commute are the only time I spend alone all day, and even those I sometimes interrupt with a text message or a quick, pointless check of Instagram. In the clutter and noise of my daily life I begin to think distraction is normal. I begin to think that productivity is important, forgetting that being present—to my work, to a conversation, to rain and sky and the strength of my body when I run—is what matters most. Often, it’s artists and writers who speak about stillness as a daily practice, about making time for meditation or boredom, for daydreaming or walking without direction, but I think such time alone is something we all need.

I remember the last day I spent alone. I was still living in the islands. It was Yom Kippur, late fall and damp cold. I drove the truck to Shark Reef and walked out to the rocks above San Juan Channel where I sat for hours, watching the water, the sky, two sea lions cruising north against the tide. I sat and thought about my mormor, who had died that February, and about other things I’ve long forgotten. But eight years later I still remember the feeling. I still remember the anxiety of having nothing to do, nothing to distract me; I remember the beauty and stillness of that gray, fall day, and the wonder of being part of it.

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
Apple Cake with Cultured Cream
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps
(I tried to make you Pan de Muerto, too. They look beautiful, but I ate one this morning and... I forgot the salt. So instead you'll be getting bread pudding next week.)

FALL BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
9 weeks remaining
Every Wednesday, OCT 2 - DEC 18
Pickup downtown, Birchwood, Fairhaven
This week: Mountain Rye, Red & White, POLENTA

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

And then the storm was on top of me. The power went out. I sat on the front porch and watched the lightning cut white though the sky. Thunder rolled over me, light and noise and the house trembling all at once. Afterwards, quiet, and I was laughing with joy, alone in the dark.

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
Gleaner's Apple Pie
Shortbread
Buckwheat Crisps

This week in the Bread Subscription
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: RUGBROD