Bread for the Heart

I didn't grow up with a clear picture of what it meant to be a woman. Raised by my father with two brothers, I had to find pieces of womanhood in the women I worked with, read about, or admired. But slowly, I built a life of intention, crafted with purpose.

As a wife, mother, and business owner, I believe the choices we make, the way we build our homes, the clothes we wear, the meals we prepare, these all shape the lives we lead. It's about creating a space for joy and peace, not by accident, but by design.

We'll explore the stories of people who live life with intention. People who don't wait for life to be perfect, but embrace the beauty and meaning in their everyday choices. Because living a life of faith and beauty isn't something we wait for, it's something we create. And through these stories, we discover new ways to flourish, one intentional step at a time.

Every loaf tells a story of time, of care, of love turned into something you can touch. At Calico Bread Co., Dan and Mackenzie have turned the slow art of bread making into a way of life, one that nourishes their family and their community.

Every morning, I wake up around 4 to 5 a.m. We have a minimum amount of loaves to deliver to grocery stores and to the local farm stand, and I'm baking between 16 to 24 loaves every day. We also have two children, and they wake up and accompany me in my baking around 5.30 a.m., so I'm not alone for too long. But they come out, and by 8.30, all of the loaves are out of the oven, and then Mackenzie comes and wraps them all up.

We have our calico bread cloth that we use for the farm stand. How do you think calico bread has affected just your spiritual life? You know, it's truly daily bread, and it's something where I can come up and reflect every morning in the quiet and solitude before the boys are up. I get my extra prayer time in, too, and it's a time for me to, we were talking about the sacrifice, for me to offer it up. It's about the bread, but it's not really about the bread.

Yeah, it truly is. It's not, I'm just a, you know, a moving piece in all this. Yeah, a catalyst. Yeah. And so now, after this, you're going to actually hand mix this. We'll add the flour and the salt, and then it's about 15 minutes of kneading per tub, and then after that, it's good to sit for a while.

So, scoring is really just a fancy word for putting a little slice on the top of the loaf that gives it a release point for when the dough is in the oven, it needs a tension relief point to expand a little bit. You can sort of get fancy and try to make a little design or just add some extra slashes.

All right, and at this point, we are ready to bake. In a world that hurries everything, the Calico Kitchen feels like another time, where patience still has a place, and beauty comes from the slow work of hands. What grounds me often is just thinking about... What are we actually doing? I'm making a product that's the oldest known food to man, known to man, and it's three ingredients, and I'm handing it to my neighbors, and that has brought us success, so I think if we can stick to the most simplistic view of it, aligned with us leaning into...

The Holy Spirit that's been guiding us this whole way, we are sort of just allowing it to happen to us, and seeing where it takes us. We're not mapping out a five-year plan for Calico. We're taking it really week by week, and sort of happy to do so. But that also, I think, allows us to give each other extra graces, because we know that we're both on the same ride together.

And none of us needs to commandeer the ship in a way that would be too turbulent. Showing my boys that... They have this environment around them that is stable. We're doing the same things. Their father is creating something with his hands every day. We're sharing it with our neighbors.

It's sort of just like a virtue that I want to ensure that they're exposed to. These are the years that we can and should be hustling, and it's a blessing to be able to do that. Bread has always been communal, meant to be shared.

Here in Pennsylvania, the Calico family bakes not for profit, but for people, to pair with the neighbor's meal, or for the family who wants to gather around something real. Oh, boy, let's go to the farm. Where are we going?

Going to the farm. What farm? My mom leads her farm. You lead the way. Yeah, come on. Yeah, we're going to go drop it off in the bowls. Good job. Come on. So, did you shop here prior to having your bread here? Yeah, we did. We used to pick up eggs here, and then once we became friends with them... You're part of it. Yeah, we've watched them grow, they've watched us grow. It's been a really beautiful friendship. Yeah.

We have a lot of customers who come here to pick up our bread, you know. It is a weekly, and so everybody knows to come get calico. They stop by the farm, they get their eggs, their honey, their flowers in season, and it is just a really neat little community hub.

Yeah. Oh, it is beautiful that you can be a part of it and continue to give back to the community. I mean, what is it like doing it together as a couple? You know, this is such a family business for you. We both work remotely. It is just a really good setup to sort of all be together. This is our project. It is theirs as much as it is ours.

And so, everyone's along for the ride. So, this will be your first winter, then, heading into, that you'll be doing it? If there's a time in our life when we can do this, you know, the kids are young, but they're at a good point where they're flexible, you know, we're not in a newborn stage right now, so it's a sort of a sweet spot where we just decided we're going to work really hard on this thing. That has been sort of presented to us.

It's led us to these beautiful places, and connecting with beautiful people, and really just investing in our community in a way that, even though we grew up here, we never knew any of this existed. Enjoy. Morning. These are our people and our places, and we didn't really come to know them until we had the opportunity to really dive into the community as providers of something. You know, we finally have something to offer. They say it takes a village, right? But now we finally feel like villagers.

There's something holy about watching dough rise. It's ordinary, but it's alive. Maybe that's why Jesus chose bread, to remind us that heaven begins in the simplest things. We've always done what needed to be done to pay the bills and make things work, but ultimately we knew that the heart of our home was going to be us together. We certainly have worked hard to make sure that that happened.

Thank you so much for coming out. So, today, we are going to go through all the steps as to how I make my sourdough loaf. So, the bread is just three ingredients. It is flour, water, and salt. It is a blessing and a responsibility to be in the position to struggle, maybe, and have hard early mornings when this is something we have been praying for forever. And what does it mean to you? Like, his sacrifices for you and your boy? I mean, it is a blessing and a responsibility to be in the position to struggle, maybe, and have hard early mornings when this is something we have been praying for forever.

It's been so edifying for me and so humbling to see just your dedication to me and our boys and our family. It's made me a better mom and a better wife. And then you're going to take the top right corner and fold it all the way down to the bottom left. And then you can sort of rotate it, and then you're rolling it up.

...and pull it towards you while you're rolling, so it's nice and tight. No, this is great. It's nice and tucked. It's a perfect sphere. You've done this before. There's lots of different ways to do this. You should be able to see light through it without it tearing a hole. So, I am a recent convert. I converted to Catholicism in 2021. One of the things that has strengthened my faith the most was just understanding to... Minimize myself so that I can make God larger in my life every day.

None of this is about me anymore, especially when you have children. The thing I'm most proud of in my entire life is my children and my marriage, and if you can look at things through that lens, everything else, all of the small inconveniences are, you know, dust in the wind.

We're really, really blessed and lucky to be here, and give a lot of thanks to you guys for it. From the kitchen to the table, the Calico family has built something lasting, not just bread, but belonging. A reminder that when we create with intention and follow God's lead, we feed more than just ourselves.

Do you think there's something to saying yes to an opportunity that God has just kind of placed in front of you? Yeah, I mean, do we really have any other choice? Like, we never asked for any of this. Like, Dan started making bread so we could eat it, and then we would share it with our friends and our family, and they prompted us on further. Keep making this. Or like, hey, do you have any extra bread? Like, we would love to have some, which then turned into maybe people would want to buy this, you know?

And so, even that has I felt like, can we take this on as a little family, and we're certainly not done having children either, and so it's kind of like we're settled in this moment where, yeah, if not now, when?

And we've met some amazing people who have had such great impacts on us, have perpetuated our success, have introduced us to new little pockets of the community, and we've really found a nice little group here that we never knew existed.

To us, this whole thing is just so much more than bread. You know, it's our whole life. It's really easy to keep going when I know I have this great backbone at home, and this huge purpose in the form of a rambunctious four- and two-year-old at home. So, it's really easy to keep the drive going.

Maybe flourishing isn't about doing more. It's about slowing down enough to make something from scratch, to share it, to love through it. Because every act of creation, even something as humble as bread, can become an offering.