Bread and Pender Island: The Happy Monk Blog < The Happy Monk Baking Company

A Happy Monk customer once told me that the next best thing to eating Happy Monk bread is reading the Happy Monk blog.

Well, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. But I was surprised to look back, a while ago, and find that there were now over 70 blog posts! “My god!” I thought, “that’s turning into a small body of work!”

I’m happy with the responses I’ve had, which make all the toil and thought I put into the blog worthwhile. Some I’m proud of, one or two I’m a bit embarrassed by.

Old-time newspaper columnists

I used to marvel at the old newspaper columnists of the 1960s or 70s who would churn out four or five x 500-word columns a week. I think of old Vancouver Sun writers like Alan Fotheringham, Jim Taylor, Pat Carney, Jack Wasserman, Bob Hunter, or Denny Boyd.

What must they have thought about their output? I’m sure cigar-chomping editors were leaning over them, yelling, “Where’s your copy, Foth?” The imperative was to get the column done, fill the hole in the page … and who cared what they wrote? Indeed, they must have been embarrassed, too, about some of their columns.

And pleased with themselves when they wrote a humdinger!

Ah! The pros there were then! Seasoned newspaper people, who could string together coherent sentences with ease, summon authority and wit at the blink of an eye and hammer out masterpieces on their noisy Underwood or Remington manuals! Copy!

Just a bread blogger

I’m just a “bread blogger,” but I still have to do all the work: come up with topics, research background information, make phone calls, source photographs (or take them myself), seek permissions to use poems or pictures, and proofread as carefully as I can, often into the wee, small hours.

Jennifer, of course, is my second set of eyes. She makes sure the posts are grammatically sound, properly spell-checked, and clearly written before they’re made live on the Happy Monk website.

There are no hot metal printing presses waiting for typeset proofs. No giant rolls of newsprint, no buckets of ink. No delivery trucks and paperboys and girls waiting across the city to get their bundles of newspapers tied with twine.

It’s just me and my blog and the Happy Monk website somewhere in the cloud.

It’s a different era, but the same challenge is there, even for a bread blogger: what to write about?

The Happy Monk experience

The bread and the baking world is the main topic here. But I’m also drawn to life on Pender Island: the community, the baker’s life, rural life, the nature around us, and my own experience of it all.

The blog has allowed me to explore these topics in ways I might not have done otherwise. It has been a way to share my experience and enthusiasm with the communities that have been so generous to Jennifer and me. And maybe the blog posts add a new dimension to the bread that emerges each week from Mildrith, the wood-fired oven. It’s just bread, after all, but it’s bread made on Pender Island!

Here’s a list of all blog post titles since day one of the Happy Monk Baking Company with links to each of them.

Click away! Revisit some of these blogs. Let me know which ones you like best. Send me some constructive criticism of ones that could be better.

I’ll try to update the list from time to time, adding more current ones.