Location: Canada
Profession: Home Baker
Social Profiles
About
Bread is a constant in our home, with some lovely jam, peanut butter, or a poached egg for breakfast, with a delightful cheese or some warming soup for lunch, and always at dinner - sometimes a flatbread, sometimes a pizza, sometimes as scarpetta to make sure none of the meal is left lonely on the plate. I think my favourite, though, is a perfect, thick slice of bread, exploding with flavour and life, just with a little butter, eaten alongside a cup of tea in the sunshine.
I have a friend who has often told me that bread is most definitely my love language, and I think he’s right. I bake for my family (my husband and our two teenage kids), for my sweet friends and neighbours, for people who I’ve heard are having a rough time and might need some extra love & support. It’s never just a tasty snack I’m leaving on your porch, it’s loaded to the brim with love and magic.
My Work
I’m from New Zealand - my family and I moved to British Columbia, Canada almost nine years ago for my husband’s job (he’s a quite fancy winemaker). So, for now, we’ve made our home in Kelowna, BC. I find North America to be a curious place in many ways, but food-wise in particular. Everything is large, and processed, and it took a very long time to figure out how to source food that hadn’t been dismembered and reassembled as something I didn’t really recognise. It’s becoming easier to find real food, but still is quite a rigmarole actually getting hold of it.
I’ve been baking bread since before our kids were born, but was never that happy with the results - then I had the good fortune to have a friend here in Canada recruit me as an experimental subject for the sourdough making classes she’d been assigned to teach at a local bakery.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. I saw where I’d been going wrong, and the spark was well and truly ignited. I then stumbled upon the sourdough school on instagram, then found Vanessa’s first book on a holiday to Portland. After deciding that I wasn’t happy with the flour on offer, I started experimenting with an old grain mill a friend found in the back of her mum’s kitchen cupboard…then once I burned that out, I bought a Komo mill (which lives in the kitchen, has a pair of googly eyes, and is named Fritz!).
I’ve taught many friends to make bread for their families, and baked as a fundraiser for our kids’ expensive school activities. I bake for a local outreach programme when I have the time, they have a couple of lovely elderly French Canadian gentlemen who had tears in their eyes when they were gifted a REAL loaf of bread in their weekly care package. This made me totally hell bent on making real bread something which isn’t just for the Rich Fancy People, because it simply shouldn’t be like this. So, after 25 years of teaching music (mostly guitar and piano), I need to expand my scope to spread a love of baking the way I’ve introduced so many children to music.
Passionate about Baking as Lifestyle Medicine
When we moved to Canada, my husband, Shane, and I immediately started to feel, for want of a better word, bleugh. Nothing had changed about the meals we were eating, we were still cooking the nourishing meals we’d always made, with what appeared to be the same ingredients. We’d previously lived in a cottage on a biodynamic vineyard, where we had an enormous vege garden, in an area which received plenty of rain, had a beautiful temperate climate and a long growing season.
With such an extensive background in organic/biodynamic growing, we started to wonder what it was about the food we were eating that was making us feel so awful (and start gaining weight!). It seemed the food we were eating here was lacking in vitality and just didn’t have the ability to nourish us in the same way. (Another of my favourite things is regenerative agriculture. Because how can your food nourish you if the soil it’s grown in is dead?).
Which leads, in a roundabout, pick a path, sort of way, to Baking as Lifestyle Medicine. The readily available food which most people have access to, is not food at all. It’s ultraprocessed, it’s smashed to pieces and reconfigured into a science project masquerading as food. It’s inflammatory and nasty, bathed in glyphosate, it simply doesn’t feed bodies, minds, or spirits in a way that makes them strong. And, as was spelled out to me with the lovely old French guys at the outreach centre, it’s the people who are in the greatest need of wholesome food who are the least able to access it.
Even those who have the financial means to access quality ingredients just don’t do it - most kids who come to our home will not eat anything I offer! They’ve been known to leave before breakfast after a sleepover, lest I show up with a naturally leavened blueberry waffle and lacto-fermented fruit compote, and expect that they’ll give it a go. Anyhow. The food systems are broken, and if nobody tries to fix them, we’re going to drown in a sea of horrible franken-food made entirely from corn derivatives. No, thank you.
My Community
Knowledge is power. And if I can gently inflict upon the community that there are options other than eating horribly, and then having to spend all of their money on supplements because they’re so unwell, perhaps their minds will open to the delicious alternatives.
Instead of crazy fad diets, and removal of whole food groups (extremely popular in this community), perhaps actually nourishing our bodies with the building blocks we need for physical and mental health might yield the results so many are desperately searching for. Also, it’s delicious! And fun! Preparing and eating food is such a joyous thing - and viewing it like a visit to the petrol station is such an unhealthy and strange perspective. People may find themselves happier if they shift their focus from quick fixes and extremes, instead following the rhythms of nature, and making peace with their bodies and the earth rather than waging an aggressive war on both.
How I use BALM Protocol
I plan to continue planting the seeds of change in people, showing them there is a better way to live. The slowness, mindfulness, and patience of baking needs to be parallelled in everyday life. There’s no instant gratification where real baking is involved, and really, this should be the same in our lives.
Education here is particularly odd (my four-year music education degree from New Zealand is entirely useless here), but if I can find a way to run workshops for young people, I think that’s a key to solving the systemic problems in the food system. In a magical world (the one where I ride a unicorn everywhere), a space with a community kitchen, where folks from all backgrounds can bake, learn to bake, and be with other nice humans, would be perfect.
