Birthday Week--Mostly Bakeries

Not so much Waiting for the Interurban, as waiting for the photographer

It's Thursday evening and I confess I'm a bit tired so this post may be heavy on unedited photos, Google-willing, with minimal text content. But who can say? (Well, I could, if I were to go back and edit this introductory text after I finish with the rest of it, but what are the odds?) 

Scott and I have taken the week off, ostensibly to celebrate my birthday in relaxed fashion, but it's been a pretty hard-working several days, with some rat slaughter (Scott), recipe testing (me), and yard tidying (both of us). We have nothing planned for tomorrow except picking up our bikes from the repair shop, which is something of a relief. I'm hoping for some quiet time in an Adirondack chair. We'll see how that goes; last time it led to sawing off some lower limbs of the magnolia and lilac. 

So then. For my birthday proper we realized my dream of bicycling to several bakeries. Scott would tell you that "several" means "more than one," but in this case it means seven. It was, blessedly, a cool and somewhat misty morning when we set out for Sugar on Queen Anne:

which, as it turned out, was the only bakery at which we sat down to have coffee and share a pastry. It was excellent:

Sadly, they're still not offering ceramic cups, but these were at least compostable

 Fortified, we coasted our bikes down the sidewalk on Mercer to meet up with the bicycle path that leads to South Lake Union and on to the path around the west side of Lake Union and thence to Bakery #2 of the day, Byen Bakeri:

The panniers would only get more loaded from here on.

 Scott waited outside and snapped the bikes and signage, while I went in to see what they had on offer. Once the first booty of the day was stored in the pannier, we headed toward Fremont where we visited the first new-to-us bakery of the day, Sea Wolf. (Note: there are no photos of the rest of the pastries purchased on the day. The quantity is downright embarrassing and really, very few looked their best by the time we got home. Restraint is not my thing when it comes to bakeries, and even carefully loaded pastries don't benefit from several hours of bumping over Seattle's mean streets.)

Sea Wolf currently has only a walk-up window, but some nice outdoor seating  is just up the stairs. We didn't loiter, however.

 Back on the Burke Gilman, post-Sea Wolf, we went our longest distance between bakeries. We left the trail at Rainier Vista on the UW campus where the vista was not so much mountain as Canada Geese, dozens upon dozens of geese, going about their goosey business of eating the grass. They were ever so charming but, oddly, I took no photos of them. We looped around the eastern edge of campus (so much more pleasant than riding straight up the Ave), encountering a little grove of large trees I had no idea existed though it must have been there decades ago when I was on campus daily: 

Bessie pretending we're miles from the city

We left campus and continued on the pleasant streets beyond Greek Row until, eventually, we reached the two great delights of NE 65th: Sod House Bakery and Bagel Oasis:

I had to wait a few minutes at Bagel Oasis for the fresh pumpernickel bagels to come out of the oven. Sadly, we did not eat them on the spot, but they were still fine several hours later. 

We did a little route-finding in order to avoid riding back up busy 65th given that it has no bike lane, discovering a cute little neighborhood park/green space just north of the bakeries. When we went that way on Bookstore Day Week we somehow missed that there is a path through the park. It was still followed by a bit of a hill climb, but on quiet residential streets where we could hear what sounded a lot like young eagles. After a few missed turns we worked our way back to 65th and so to Ravenna Blvd and the wide, smooth, separated bike lanes around Green Lake. Last time we were there, the lanes were still being worked on so we rode on the street, but now it was the dedicated lane for us. Nice while it lasted. We crossed Aurora and rode up 83rd, past the lamentably closed-on-the-day Coyle's Bake Shop, down Phinney to the second new-to-us stop of the day, Celine Patisserie. They had some nice tables on their wee patio outside, but we didn't loiter, since I was getting anxious about time.

Phinney does not lack for fine bakeries; we cruised down a dozen blocks or so to get to Fresh Flours by the zoo. It's nothing like so charming as our Fresh Flours in West Seattle, but what is?

Fresh Flours, North Seattle Edition

Well, there's always our final bakery stop of the day, Cafe Besalu, which was a lovely long coast down the hill to Ballard. Miraculously, we were able to cross 15th NW without the benefit of traffic lights. That never happens, except, apparently, on my birthday. Oh, my beloved Besalu:

Bessie just looks so at home here . . .

 I was, by this time, somewhat ravenous, and I do love hanging out on the bench in front of Besalu and yet we just added a croissant or two to the pannier and continued on because our final stop of the day was La Carta de Oaxaca, now open all afternoon and evening, with plentiful outdoor seating. Oh, Oaxaca, how I have missed you!

While we ate outside, I love the interior decor so that's the snap I post here.

And, okay, maybe we drank outside too.

 In yet more happy news, the Ballard Locks are (is?) again open to bicycle traffic so we were able to avoid the Ballard Bridge and cross the water by way of the locks. There's a bit of uphill initially on the Magnolia side of things, followed by about a mile of downhill coasting in, again, a dedicated bike lane--blissful, it was, as was the rest of the ride along the waterfront and even Alaskan Way. But by the time we'd reached Harbor Island, I was dreading the final few miles uphill in West Seattle so we put the bikes on a bus and multi-modaled the final leg. I justified it by pointing out that we'd have to get back on the bikes to take them in for their tune-ups after we off-loaded the panniers anyway. 

 The bakery tour was just shy of 33 miles, plus 2 miles to drop off the bikes and then the walk home. Not quite the Camino de Santiago, but something, right?

Even the bathrooms at bakeries offer positive affirmations

1,000 miles

Oh, it's the little things and for me, today, it's that updating my love to ride numbers with this week's lousy back-and-forth commute miles has gotten me to exactly 1,000 miles just shy of mid-July. Sadly, I expect that my overall numbers for the remaining five and a half months of the year will be lower. Biking to and from the office means my miles three days per week will be just over 4 rather than the 6 or 7 that was fairly consistent when Scott and I were going for after-work "fun and fitness" rides around the neighborhood but still. I'm pleased about this:

Because I'm just that shallow, or just that easily contented, depending on one's perspective. And, I hope, we'll get a few longer rides in over the remainder of the summer and early fall. Good lord willin'.

Apricot - lemon preserves, 2021

 

Domesticity with Apricots: 12.5 cups total

We bought apricots last week and also harvested close to twenty more from our very own tree, but it wasn't until today that we actually made a move on making this year's apricot preserves. Like the raspberry jam, it's pretty lemon forward which we both like a great deal. Whether it's everyone's cup of tea is another question, but then few people are as enthused about apricot preserves as I am. This year's batch is particularly deserving of its "summer sunshine in a jar" code name.

 After more calculating than one might think called for, we ended up weighing up 7 pounds of pitted apricots and cooking them in two separate batches. (That one of the burners had some sort of meltdown yesterday made things just that much more challenging.) We divided the apricots into two batches of 3.5 pounds each. For each batch we put

about 2.25 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of water

into a large pot and brought it to a boil before letting it simmer a bit until it became clear. While Scott was busy stirring that so it wouldn't stick and burn, I was chopping up the apricots into smallish bits so they'd cook faster and generally break down better. I added half of that chopped apricot (so about 1.75 pounds) to the sugar water and we cooked it over medium heat until it was all getting nicely melded and cooked down--about twentyish minutes, I think. The remainder of the apricot (another 1.75 pounds) then got added to the pot and all that cooked, again at mediumish heat with a lot of stirring and minimal neglect, until it all became a pleasing consistency--a mostly smoothish texture with some interesting chunks still--close to another half hour of cooking probably. When we thought it was close we added lemon juice and lemon zest. I had zested and juiced most of two lemons. I used probably 4 or 5 tablespoons of juice and half  the zest in the first pot and about the same in the second pot; we had a fair bit of lemon juice left over for the evening's cocktails.

The ladling into jars went pretty smoothly, aside from the time I was mistaken about having screwed the lid on properly; I'll just say that could have been much worse. Scott opted to give all the filled jars a water bath just to be thorough while I concentrated on quality testing with crackers and chevre.

Gradka would not have approved of snacking testing on the production floor.

But she would, I think, be pleased with this year's jewel-like tones.

Raspberry-Lemon Jam 2021

 

The essential, traditional test

 Another brief post to record life chez Aurora. We took advantage of this morning's cool temperatures--and having invested in several boxes of berries at yesterday's farmer's market--to make a batch of raspberry jam. We did not skimp on the lemon juice and zest so it's nicely lemony. This year's recipe mirrored what we did in 2019:

For each pot:

6 cups of rinsed berries, mashed and cooked over medium-heat for 15 minutes. 

Add to raspberries and then cook for about 10 minutes:

4 cups of granulated sugar
1/4 cup lemon juice
zest of one large lemon (about 3-5 tablespoons)

Use cold-plate test to determine that jam is ready to go into sterilized jars.

2 pots of jam = 14 jars (aka 13 cups) of raspberry delight

The apricots we bought yesterday need a few days to ripen a bit before we can move onto this year's apricot preserves.