Before Lindsay-Jean Hard joined the staff of Zingerman’s— the famed, Ann Arbor community of businesses that includes a deli, bakery, mail order company, and many more offshoots—she was Food52’s OG community editor. She created the Food52 Cookbook Club and Baking Club, sparked conversation in the comments and on the Hotline, and applied her background in urban planning and sustainability to Cooking With Scraps, a Food52 column focused on food waste that she turned into an IACP Award-nominated cookbook of the same name.
Knowing her affinity for making the most of every ingredient, it’s easy to trace the lineage of the Oh So A-Peeling Banana Bread in the new cookbook that she co-authored, Zingerman’s Bakehouse Celebrate Every Day: A Year’s Worth of Favorite Recipes for Festive Occasions, Big and Small, back to Lindsay-Jean. This riff on her Genius Banana Peel Cake is a personal favorite, she said, “in part, because it is a solid version of a classic that is ready for any tweak you want to throw at it. But also because I'm proud of the fact that I helped reduce food waste at the Bakehouse with a tweak to their original recipe—it now uses the whole banana, peel and all!”