heart-shaped bread

I've done it - I've learned how to bake bread. After years upon years of my mom's nagging, hassling insistence that I apprentice to her bread-making art, I have finally succumbed. Granted, I didn't learn from her as she has always intended, but still. 

My mom has a weird history with bread. I think in her mind it's tied to being Canadian, since she didn't learn how to bake it until she came to Canada. She still doesn't eat it that often, despite baking it ALL the time. She has a reputation for baking really delicious bread, though - my dad's family visits for the sole purpose of eating her bread; visitors to our house go away with sacks full of buns and loaves. My entire childhood is full of the background smell of bread in the oven, yeasty and warm and delicious; bread dough rising in bowls covered with cloths; floured surfaces and my mom's hands kneading dough into the shape of loaves. When she and my dad were first married and she was learning the method of making bread, she would follow the recipes my dad brought home for her (this sounds so patriarchal, and it kind of is, in a way - but more on that later), and they would invariably result in disaster. It wasn't until she threw away the recipes and experimented with her own style that she managed to make awesome delicious bread. I think that's where her disdain for recipes first began. She's an improviser and a semi-copycat more than anything else. She has a habit of, when we're at restaurants, looking at a particularly tasty dish and announcing, "I could make that." Most often, she can't. Though she so likes to try. 

There's not much point to all of this except to say: making bread is a lot of fun. The heart-shape was wholly unintentional, but pretty cool. 

Here, to bring some measure of meaning to this blog post: 

to be followed with viewing this:

The first video is Nelly's original "Hot in Here"; the second is Jenny Owen Youngs' cover/reimagining, "Hot in Herre."

I have a bizarre love for covers, remixes, and mashups. I think they can cast a new light on the source music, change the interpretation, revise a message inherently demeaning  into one ironic and hilarious.