Ingredients:

• Vegan butter or coconut oil for greasing
• 10 oz flour, plus extra for dusting 
• 5.25 oz sugar (vegan)
• ¾ tsp salt
• ¾ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp ground cloves
• 4 large peeled overripe bananas (about 1 ¾ cups)
• 6 Tbsp / ¾ stick vegan butter (such as Earth Balance) or coconut oil, melted and cooled
• ¼ cup vegan yogurt
• ¼ cup vegan sour cream
• 2 Tbsp ground flaxseed, mixed with 2 Tbsp cool water
• 1 tsp vanilla
• ¾ cups chocolate chips (vegan)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Your heating bill is already sky high from having to heat the whole house all day every day while you work hunched over your computer at your desk wrapped in a blanket on weekdays, and while you sit hunched over the news on your tablet wrapped in a blanket while slowly rocking back and forth on weekends, so the inefficiency of warming up a big oven to bake a single little loaf of banana bread won’t even register.
2. Use vegan butter or coconut oil to grease a 9”x5”x3” loaf tin.
3. Keep thinking that Americans don’t call it a tin, but loaf “pan” just sounds wrong now, especially after having binge-watched every season of The Great British Bake Off (all the ones they released in America, anyway). Dust with flour and tap out the excess.
4. In a large mixing bowl, sift in 10 oz of flour, because you don’t measure flour in volume anymore, perish the thought. Since you’ve been doing a lot more cooking in the past year than you expected, naturally you now have a reliable kitchen scale and wonder how you ever survived without it.
5. Sift in the sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cloves, and stir to combine. Set aside.
6. In a medium mixing bowl, add the peeled bananas and mash with a fork. Mash, and mash, pulverize those suckers until they’re destroyed, until they’re nothing but an unrecognizable lumpy goo, just like 2020 pulverized your now gooey heart.
7. Realize you didn’t already melt and cool the butter, in fact you haven’t even gotten it out of the fridge yet, and kick yourself because you know about mise en place, and you’ve made this recipe a hundred times before, but you never remember to prep the butter ahead of time. But why should this time be any different. Put the butter in a dish in the microwave and nuke it until it’s melted. Probably didn’t need to microwave it for quite as long as you did, now it’s pretty hot. Set it aside, and try to remember it at the end when it’s hopefully a little cooler.
8. Add the vegan yogurt, sour cream, flax eggs… damn. Ok, grind up some flax seeds in the coffee grinder, measure out two tablespoons of meal, and combine with water. Stir for a minute, and wonder if it needs to sit and thicken for a while. It looks pretty thick, so it’s probably good enough. Add them to the bowl, along with the vanilla. Stir everything to combine.
9. Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Fold with a rubber spatula until just mixed. Suddenly remember the butter is still cooling on the counter, and pour it in now. No one will know. Mix to combine.
10. Stir in the chocolate chips. It’s been a rough year. There should be chocolate chips stirred into two, if not three, foods you consume daily. Pour some extra chocolate chips into your hand and eat them straight. You’ve survived this long, and you deserve some chocolate chips for your trouble.
11. With a spatula scrape the batter into the prepared baking tin. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes until a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Set on the counter to cool for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.
12. Wash your hands while counting to 20-mississippi for the 1000th time today. Carefully wrap the banana bread in plastic wrap and thank fuck for the one measley consolation that it’s still safe to give food to your family who only live ten minutes down the road, because it’s an excuse to see them in person even for just two minutes while wearing masks, standing six feet apart, outside in the cold, since you usually only see them on Zoom anymore and they might as well be living on the other side of the country, and you miss them in a long-distance way. Hope that a little loaf of banana bread can make their winter just slightly less dark and lonely, and feel a little better because you were still able to reach out and show them you care in a small way.
13. Go back home and do your dishes, because they haven’t been clean all at once since last March. Keep doing dishes, because they are somehow all dirty again now, all the time. Long for the day when the dishes will once again all be clean.