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Good morning bread friends,

I’m so excited to be back baking this weekend!

I have to confess that even our family ran out of bread in our house this past week. 🥖🙃

After the leftover sliced bread in the freezer had been all used up, we needed to solve the bread problem. When Hannah came home from school on Tuesday it stopped her in her tracks when she saw the store-bought bread sitting on the counter. “Why did we get bread from the store!?” she said loudly, with a confused voice.

I felt a little defensive… but mostly I felt proud. She’s so deeply accustomed to handmade food, that a bag of sandwich bread from the grocery store registers as an anomaly for her.

It reminded me of a similar thing that she said when she was probably four years old. She was randomly flipping through a Hy-Vee catalog and came across an ad for blueberry muffins on sale. She looked up at me with completely earnest curiosity and asked, “Why would people buy muffins from the store if you could just make them?”

To be sure, I’ve never made muffins in my life. That question wasn’t actually meant for me. Long before I ever picked up bread baking, Melissa has been the prolific baker in our household. She bakes as her hobby and can bake just about anything that she sets her mind to. As such, the vast majority of all the pastries that Hannah ate for the first 4 years of her life were all handmade by her mom. We’re talking scones, muffins, donuts, bagels, cookies, dinner rolls, everything. Hannah just grew up assuming that’s where baked goods came from: someone’s hands in your own kitchen.

Speaking of things that Melissa bakes fantastically well, it’s about to be Irish soda bread season. ☘️ With St. Patrick’s Day coming up, I’m really looking forward to our annual tradition of Melissa baking a couple of loaves of Irish soda bread. It’s another one of those things that I’ve never attempted myself, but I’ve come to deeply love as part of our family food traditions.

As a kid growing up, St. Patrick’s Day was always a big deal in our household because my mom’s side has Irish ancestry. We always claimed that with a great deal of pride. Some of the DNA testing that my uncle has done over the years has shown that the Irish percentage in our heritage is probably considerably smaller than what we assumed… but I’d guess we’re hardly the first to overstate their Irish ancestry. We’re definitely keeping annual Irish food tradition going either way. 😎

Anyway, this is a bunch of reflections on cozy baking this week… because otherwise my heart has been heavy lately thinking about how our country is in a new war. And unfortunately our Congress continues to abdicate any responsibility for having a say in what direction the President takes our country in. (aka: refusing to do their job in any basic way imagined by our constitution and our laws)

We should not be bombing schools. I think we should probably all be considerably more outraged than we are about this is happening in our name as Americans. Shout out to those of you who are already writing to your elected officials to make your opposition known. It matters. For those of you who are looking for a place to start, here are two links (NWYC & Indivisible) that make it easy to write your elected officials about this (or any) topic.

My reflection this week is: There’s always an invitation to be a person of peace. And I’m praying about how to not just hold that as a value, but find ways to practice that in a tangible way.

As you know, Bread & Justice is a philanthropic bakery where we donate 100% of our profits each month to different nonprofits doing social justice-oriented work. For the month of February, we were donating to Black Voters Matter, and we’re proud to share that we donated $68. Thank you all for making that possible through the bread that you ordered. If you want to donate directly to them you can click here to do that.

For the month of March, we’re donating our profits to Rising Kites. Rising Kites is a nonprofit that does a number of cool things to make the world a little brighter for traditionally overlooked individuals. Rising Kites Coffee is a nonprofit food business that provides employment and job training opportunities to individuals with intellectual disabilities. Rising Kites Flowers is a seasonal flower subscription along the same lines. And both fall under the umbrella of Rising Kites, which is a midwestern nonprofit that provides resources for parents that get a Down syndrome diagnosis. We’ve known of them for a number of years and our family has supported them in the past. When you buy bread this month, know that the profits are going towards supporting this beautiful mission.

As always, bread is available to pre-order right now, for pickup this Saturday.

Thank you for being community.

Cheers,
Mo