Bread

Bread has always been a symbol. You can find references to bread in religion, literature, highly studied pieces of art during the renaissance and more. Bread is not just that delicious carbohydrate that fuels our cells and gives us energy. It is much, much more. If we stopped and asked every single person we came in contact with about a memory they have involving bread, many will have something to share… and we’ll get nothing else done in a day!

I remember making bread with my grandmother… we called her Grams. She had a bread-maker and I remember unceremoniously tossing ingredients in there and ending up with bread. I’m sure there was more to it than that, but I was pretty young. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen when I was a kid, and when I was looking at apartments, I told my mother that on the top of my must have list was a “kitchen that we all wanted to hang out in.”

During the pandemic, a friend of mine got me interested in the reality TV show The Great British Bake-Off. As I’m sure you remember, we didn’t have much to do since the city was shut down. If I wasn’t at work, I was home with the rest of the population of New York City. The show basically tests amateur bakers from around Great Britain on different types of bakes, including numerous types of bread to French patisserie and even American pies. So, while I was being a nurse during a global pandemic, my desire to bake bread found a renewal in the oddest of times.

Fast forward a few months of closing on the place, moving, working, grad school and more… I made my first loaf.

As I cut into my first loaf, all I could think of were the people who had helped me make it. To be clear, I’m being super meta because I was alone while I made it! I don’t even think I could list them all. This got me to thinking about how lucky I am to be loved and to love my family and my chosen family. From the generous gifts of a kitchen scale and mixing bowls (the very same ones they use on the baking show – I know, I have a problem) to physically helping me move the packages to the new kitchen, to sending me a bread knife via Amazon since I was sweating cutting bread with a vegetable knife, and much, much more. I am devilishly blessed with so many amazing people that I call loved ones. I even got to share my first loaf with loved ones, which was an absolute treat.

So to all of you lovely humans out there that I have had the good fortune to come into contact with, consider your love baked into each loaf of bread I make!