At my first job out of college, a guy on my team used to eat the exact same lunch every single day. (Okay technically it was my second job—but the real first lasted a whopping 5 days that flew by in a whirl of tailored pencil skirts with stilettos, mergers & acquisitions trainings, mind-numbing Excel spreadsheet manipulation, Seamless-ordered dinners with beers enjoyed in an airless cubicle, and deeply existential misery as to my life’s path: a story for another time!)
Our desks were nestled together behind a wall of chest-high partitions; while we rarely ate lunch together, most of us ended up sitting and eating at our keyboards within sight of everyone else. We’d pair off and venture out into the bustling throngs of Times Square to pick up food—those with vegetable proclivities would join the lines at Chopt for a salad, while others would hit the halal cart for chicken and turmeric-spiced rice doused in white sauce or walk the three blocks to Kati Roll for overstuffed doughy rounds of paratha bread rolled up around aloo masala—mashed potato patties with spices and tomatoes.
I often brought my lunch: leftovers from dinner (editor’s note—can we all agree to call these extras instead of leftovers?) or something mundane and nutritious like a Fage yogurt and hummus with baby carrots or an apple with Wasa crackers and cottage cheese. I don’t know, guys. Don’t judge me. I was young and trying to figure out how to drink a lot of cocktails and still be a functioning human being. It was a formative time. I ate a lot of boxed Pacifica butternut squash soup and Breyer’s mint chip ice cream.
Anyway—Michael, the coworker in question, had a mini fridge under his desk. Why, you might ask, did he have his own fridge when we had a fridge on every floor of the office? His lunch was sacred, that’s why. He didn’t want it mingling with other people’s tuna salad wraps and half-drunk Blueprint juices and pints of strawberries with post-its affixed to the side with angry scrawl denoting that these are Rachel’s! do not eat!
Every day Michael would open his fridge and draw out a flimsy plastic sandwich bag. Not the sturdy Ziplock kind that actually zips, but the kind you just fold over at the top that never stays fully closed. You know.
He would unfold the bag and carefully place his sandwich on his desk. The bag contained a sandwich on whole wheat bread (the squishy store-bought kind) with a very austere amount of mayonnaise, a single leaf of romaine lettuce, and a few slices of deli turkey.
It was his thing. When we had client dinners or team outings, he’d happily eat out—he was adventurous and would throw down his credit card for steak dinners or Brazilian churrasqueiras or the perfectly executed pizzas at Roberta’s in Bushwick. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t picky about food and wasn’t overly thrifty either. He just…really found comfort in a daily turkey sandwich.
I get it! So much is always shifting around us that it’s nice to have one reliable detail to pin down the day.
Maybe for you it’s a morning cup of coffee, or a run around the same loop of trail, or a shower just before bed with Dove bodywash.
Or it could be something less quotidian but just as rhythmic—a recipe you reach for without thinking about it, a Saturday kayak to the island just off the coast, a Sunday bike ride, or even better: Sunday sundaes.
Okay are you ready to hear mine? BANANA BREAD.
(Wait, did you just swear out loud? “THIS WOMAN WILL NOT STOP TALKING ABOUT G-D BANANA BREAD.” I’m going to keep doing it until you make it, so maybe just get on board already, okay?)
Every time I make banana bread, I taste the first bite and then I swan into the living room and declare out loud to nobody in particular (and often, literally to nobody but the bookshelf): “This is the best banana bread I’ve made so far!”
I’ve determined that this is less because of my exceptional skill in the banana bread recipe development department and more because you cannot mess up banana bread. It’s always good!
Unlike other recipes where I don’t want to mess with the classic (graham crackers, macaroni and cheese, cornbread, biscotti, to name but a few)—banana bread begs for variations, and each one is as good as the next. (We’ve been over this plenty here but you can try triple chocolate rye, cardamom sourdough, extra-moist crunchy cream cheese millet, two-banana brown butter, sour cream, miso, eggless chocolate, and poppyseed yogurt, to name a few.)
Today, however, is banana bread made with extra vanilla and crème fraîche and rye. It’s…incredible. I’m going to leave it at that, since I’m sure you’ve already stopped reading and are rushing to the kitchen to pull out your loaf pans. Well done.
Note: I’ve made this recipe with plain crème fraîche and vanilla extract as well as with vanilla crème fraîche (I used Vermont Creamery’s which is goooooood if you can find it in a store) and both are awesome. You can never really add too much vanilla, is the moral of the story here. I mean, you could. Obviously. But you won’t.
Vanilla Crème Fraîche Banana Bread
Makes one 9” x 5” loaf
1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup (106g) brown sugar
1/4 cup (50g) granulated sugar
2 eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup (113g) crème fraîche
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 ripe bananas, mashed
1 1/2 cups (180g) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (53g) rye flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
turbinado sugar, for sprinkling
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and lightly grease a 9” x 5” loaf pan.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter and both sugars until fluffy, about 3 minutes on medium-high speed.
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each and scraping down the bowl as needed.
Add the crème fraîche and vanilla extract.
Add the mashed bananas and beat for another minute or two on medium-high speed.
Add both flours, baking soda, and salt and mix until the batter is just combined.
Scrape the batter into your prepared pan. Sprinkle a generous amount of turbinado sugar (about 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons) on top in an even layer.
Bake for about 60 to 65 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center just comes out clean with no wet batter clinging to it. Do not overbake.