I only met this gracious and gifted young woman a few weeks ago, and I don’t know her well,  but she has changed my life and brought a healthy, surprising, and bright spot to it. The pandemic took some things away and brought some other things. It brought some brilliant food makers and creatives to our community, and suddenly, I could pick up the best bread I’ve ever had right by a covered bridge one town up the road.

Kean, who is soft-spoken and slightly shy, is creative through and through. She is working hard to start a baking business and getting noticed. I think she missed Washing when she moved, but she is clearly beginning to like it and is experimenting with all kinds of ideas to get her business going.

I have lived here for nearly 20 years and have never seen or tasted bread like this, not even when I lived in New York or Washington. Kean is the new future of rural eating.

She is also breaking ground and joining the group for the small group of young farmers and bakers who have either been here or moved here to escape big cities during the pandemic. She uses the things they grow to help the rural economy. Organic farmers need all the help they can get.

Kean’s husband Jordan is very serious about his beekeeping, and I swear the teaspoon of honey I take has wiped out most of my allergies and boosted my energy. I can’t eat a lot of money, but a small teaspoon with breakfast has worked for me. Jordan works from home at his job as a consultant for fund-raisers.

Kean and her fellow dreamers, cooks, and bakers are changing this world. I love their passion for food and their loyalty to one another. It’s a great boon to people like me who miss cities’ diverse and original food offerings. Up here, veggie burgers are still a surprise.

I never bought bread this way. Most bread isn’t good for me, but I’ve hit the jackpot.

Every Monday, I drive to the Covered Bridge Food Co. in Kean’s house and open a chest out front with my bread and honey. I leave the money in an envelope and drive away. I can go to the Farmer’s Market if I want to talk to Kean. It’s an innovation for the country.

It is a pleasure to drive a few miles away and bring home this fresh and nutritious bread. It far transcends the supermarket experience. And so does the bread.

Our rural world is changing, and it is primarily gifted and determined young women bringing this long-overdue creativity and enthusiasm to the area. I remember moving here and asking a cashier in our small town if they sold wheat bread. She looked at me as if I had fallen out of a spaceship. They have wheat bread now.

Kean offers new and original ways to buy bread – get it at the Farmer’s Market in various food stories, subscribe, and pick it up in porches in one or two nearby towns, as I do. I have a hunch Kean will have her bakery someday.

I have bought into something from her I never did before a flat rate subscription to get one of the chewy and healthy bread for Maria and me. I’d drive a lot farther than the bridge for bread like this, a sourdough loaded with flax, fennel, poppy, and sunflower. I was overjoyed to find it and subscribe monthly.

My leavened seed bread is one of her less remarkable bread offerings at the moment; this week, Kean is  proud of this focaccia: crumbled pork sausage, fresh mozzarella, grated fontina, and a “little spice from my favorite Calabrian chillis.”

I got an e-mail from her early this morning: “The focaccia special this week is a can’t-miss. I know this isn’t the first time that I have said that. There have been a lot of great focaccia specials in the past. Still, I generally don’t get quite as excited about the focaccia specials in the winter when I can’t use the amazing produce that our local farms produce all summer. I am very excited about this focaccia…”

I love that last line.

I drooled over this focaccia at the farmer’s market this morning, but I can’t eat bread like that; I stick to the muli seeds and grains. I do admire Kean’s enthusiasm and passion for her work. To me, that makes all of the difference. Her work is a vocation, not a job. That means she loves it especially and with passion, as Maria loves hers.

Spoken like a trained and Michelin-starred chef who comes from Washington, D.C, and lives with her husband Jordan by the beautiful Battenville River (where I nearly drowned once jumping into the stream to save my Lab Julius, who, it turns out, was the only Lab ever who didn’t know how to swim, having grown up in New Jersey.)

I feel blessed to get a load of bread like this; I have never seen one in the town, the county, or the region, for that matter. I’m going to subscribe for as long as I can. The bread (I’ve nibbled some of her cookies, too; I got them for Maria) is fantastic, and I am a big fan of Jordan’s raw honey, a food I can eat and enjoy in small amounts – a teaspoon every morning. I wish everyone in the world had access to bread like this.

(From Kean’s blog intro, it says a lot about her: Covered Bridge Bread Company is the creation of Kean McIlvaine, a classically trained Michelin-starred chef from Washington, DC, but has made her home in Shushan, NY. She handcrafts bread and other baked goods and lives by the motto that freshly baked bread shouldn’t be a luxury but a human right.) Go Kean.

(If you have diabetes, choosing raw honey that does not contain added sugars is the best way. But even though raw honey does not contain added sugar, it should still be treated like table sugar and eaten in moderation. New studies show that small amounts of raw honey help diabetics maintain a good sugar level. For diabetics, eating in moderation is everything.)