This is literally just banana bread with some bits in it, but I feel the granola-esque nature of the aforementioned bits more than allows for the confident title of Breakfast Banana Bread. And confident I shall be, for this banana bread is simple, only requires one bowl, and tastes wonderful—hearty yet light, comfortingly sweet yet posing no danger to your teeth, sensibly oaty yet luxurious.

I’m feeling tentative and wary about 2022; it has started off in a way that knocked me sideways and threw me completely onto the back foot, and I’m still fragile from spending a third of 2021 in lockdown, and with the omicron variant of Covid closing in on us like a particularly dedicated homing pigeon, planning for the near future feels foolish. Besides which, it’s SO HOT, too hot to be cogent or reasonable, and I know it’s the middle of summer and this heat shouldn’t be a surprise but the news said it’s the hottest recorded summer of all time and I feel I’m within my rights to be agitated.

But even with all that I’m ready to cook again and this breakfast banana bread is an unassuming and low-key reminder of my love of thinking about food and then acting successfully on those thoughts. Banana bread was of course one of the culinary signposts of Covid Season 1 but my making it is no comment on the state of things—we just had some overripe bananas slumping on the bench, and regardless of the heat I was reminded of the comforting joy to be found in rustling up a warm baked loaf of something.

Though its long list of ingredients would suggest otherwise this recipe really is very straightforward. I imagine you could dispatch the seeds, dried fruit, and oats and replace them with 3/4 cup of actual granola for an even speedier route to your comfort food. And don’t let the name lock you into any kind of timeline: this would make an excellent midnight snack, too.

Breakfast Banana Bread

One-bowl, very simple, mildly spruced-up vegan banana bread. Oh, and it’s delicious, of course, at any time of day. And if it’s regular, un-spruced vegan banana bread you’re after, my 2019 recipe should do the trick. Makes one loaf, recipe by myself.

• 1 tablespoon chia seeds
• 3 ripe bananas
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon molasses or golden syrup
• 1/4 cup soy milk (or similar)
• 2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons rice bran oil, or similar neutral oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup rolled oats
• 1/4 cup pitted dates, roughly chopped (or sultanas, or other dried fruit)
• 2 tablespoons sunflower seeds
• 1 and 1/2 cups plain flour
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 – 1 teaspoon cinnamon

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F and line a loaf tin with baking paper. In a small cup, mix the tablespoon of chia seeds with 2 tablespoons of water and set aside to let the seeds absorb the liquid.

2: Roughly mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl—I just used my wooden spoon to do this—and stir in the 3/4 cup sugar, the tablespoon of molasses, and the soaked chia seeds. Then stir in the 1/4 cup milk, two teaspoons apple cider vinegar, two tablespoons oil, teaspoon of vanilla, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup rolled oats, 1/4 cup chopped dates, and two tablespoons of sunflower seeds.

3: Tip in the 1 and 1/2 cups flour and the 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking soda (I always sieve baking soda because I live in fear of finding lumps of it in my baking) and gently stir everything together till the flour is only just combined with the wet ingredients. Spatula this mixture into your prepared loaf tin and sprinkle the cinnamon over the surface. Bake for 45 minutes, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean. Once cool, store in an airtight container.

music lately:

Fantaisie-Impromptu by Hazel Scott—her piano virtuosity breathes new life into this already pretty thrilling Chopin number.

30 Seconds by Tracy Bonham. My bordering-on-unhinged obsession with the TV show Yellowjackets has seen me revisiting Bonham’s music and I hate to sound completely ancient but I miss when music sounded like this, all Breeders-y and sweet but knowing and sinister! Who’s doing it like that these days?

30/90, the opening number from Jonathan Larson’s musical, and also later the 2021 film adaptation, Tick, Tick… Boom!, and it is with a supreme and entirely unearned confidence that I link both the 2001 original Off-Broadway cast version and the 2021 film version. I imagine there’s about three of you who could be bothered to listen to both, let alone one. But still I link them both, because I can’t think about this electrifying song without considering Raul Esparza’s unearthly, not-found-in-nature vibrato in the 2001 stage show, and honestly I have to hand it to Andrew Garfield in the 2021 film adaptation, he gave it his all and seems to embody Jonathan Larson, both the person and the version of himself that Larson wrote into his shows. Because I’ve been so utterly burnt by film adaptations of musicals before I can afford to be generous here, I really loved Tick, Tick… Boom! and the slight changes to the arrangements of this song, like bringing forward the harmonies with Joshua Henry, make it somehow even more exhilarating.

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