Dream Big!

Debriefing on our virtual pizza class & announcing May partner

May 3, 2022

Good morning Bread Friends!

I hope your Tuesday is starting off well. I’m excited to be offering bread again this week. If you’re interested in buying bread this week, you can go ahead and click this link to pre-order now, for pickup this Thursday.

Last week I wasn’t baking because I was in North Vancouver, BC for work. It was a beautiful and very productive trip. Now that I’m back… it was (as usual) a balm to my soul to get my hands back in the dough yesterday.

I forgot to get a picture of the cute little bakery that I ate at each morning… but here are some of the scenes that I was enjoying while I was walking around Canada surrounded by people who have free healthcare from their government.

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of partnering with Pasture & Plenty to host a virtual pizza-making class. I want to share a huge heart felt THANK YOU to everyone who signed up and participated in the class.

I didn’t fully appreciate it until the night was over… but this was a bit of a dream come true for me! I had done something similar for small audiences a couple of times, but this was my first time teaching a pizza-making class that was open to the public. It was such a blast getting to share my love of pizza with my community - and I want to share out some of the pictures that people kindly shared with me afterwards.

I first started attempting to make pizza in college. Ever since then, I have been a self-taught pizza making enthusiast. Learning to do something well enough to attempt to teach it takes time. I’ve scoured numerous pizza books, read countless blogs and Reddit posts, listened to hundreds of hours of pizza-making podcasts… but most importantly I’ve just attempted to make thousands of pizzas over the past 15 years.

I say attempted because I’ve failed a bunch of times while trying to make pizza. I haven’t always been confident in my pizza-making ability. I’ve just always wanted to increase my skills in this area.

And increasing my skill comes with learning from successes as well as failures. This is why I’m extra grateful to the folks who participated in the class and afterwards sent me feedback on ways that they felt that it could get better next time. This includes a long phone call with my mom where she gave me pointers on about a dozen different things that I could do to make it easier on myself and on participants next time.

I’m just getting started on this pizza teaching journey… but I’ve never been more excited to continue to learn and continue to dream big.

I hope you’re dreaming big for something too.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a newsletter about my commitment to being more attentive to the dehumanization and racial dicrimination against Asian Americans in our country. This reflection was prompted by a murderous attack on several AAPI women in Atlanta.

This month, as we enter Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I want to re-state that I’m still here, still learning & still committed to justice for my AAPI brothers & sisters. For the month of May, we at Bread & Justice will be donating 100% of our profits to AAPI Civic Engagement Fund. The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to building multi-racial alliances to fight racism and xenophobia, advance policy change to protect communities from discrimination, and support those impacted by anti-AAPI hate and violence.

Through AAPI Civic Engagement Fund’s four program areas: Funding, Narrative, Research, and Movement Building, we support the development of local AAPI groups in achieving long-term policy and systems change and building a durable social justice movement.

I look forward to sharing more about this organization later this month. For now I just want to thank you for being a part of this Bread & Justice community. The work of fighting for justice in our society will always be ongoing… but it is a great source of encouragement to have community to lean on as we do the work together.

Cheers,
Mo

🍕P.S. A few of you wrote to me to say that you were sad that you missed out on the pizza making class and you hoped that I’d do another one some day. I don’t have any dates to announce yet, but I’m pretty confident that I’ll be doing this again in a few months. You’ll be the first to know :)

🥖P.P.S. Now that you’re done reading… don’t forget to order a loaf of bread for this Thursday’s pickup.