Gluten-Free Banana Muffins — The Other Bread That Waits on the Counter

The week began the way the weeks begin now: coffee at 5:30 AM in the dark kitchen, Sven at my feet, the lake beginning to show itself through the window as the gray of pre-dawn turned into the gray of full dawn. The silence is no longer the silence I feared. The silence is the architecture of a life I am still learning to live in. I have lived in this house for thirty-seven years. The first thirty-two of them, Paul lived here too. The last five, he has not. The math gets clearer every year and the meaning gets harder. Mamma called Tuesday. Her voice was small but her mind was sharp. She wanted to talk about Pappa, of all people. About the time he fixed her bicycle in 1962. About how he always said "there" when he had finished a job, the same way every time, the small declarative finality. She had not thought of this in years, she said. The memory came to her in the kitchen, while she was peeling an apple. I listened. I did not interrupt. The memory was unprovoked and total. The memory is everything. Erik came over Sunday. He chopped wood for me without being asked — the pile by the back door was getting low, and Erik had noticed, and Erik had brought his ax, and Erik had spent forty-five minutes splitting and stacking and not making a single comment about how the wood needed to be done. He drank coffee. He left. The whole visit was forty-five minutes. It was perfect. Erik is a perfect brother in the specific way of Scandinavian brothers — silent, useful, present. I cooked Pumpkin bread this week. Loaf cake heavy with pumpkin and warm spices. Walnuts inside. Best the second day, with butter, in the morning, with coffee. The Damiano Center on Thursday: wild rice soup, fifty gallons. Gerald helped me ladle. He told me about a regular who got into a sober house this week — a man named Curtis, who has been coming for soup for eight years and who has been sober for forty-three days now. The soup did not get him sober. The soup was there when he was hungry. The soup is the door, again. The door is the chance. I read one of Paul's books in the evening. The Edmund Fitzgerald chapter. I have read it forty times now. The fortieth time is no less affecting than the first. The transmission still gives me a chill: "We are holding our own." Captain McSorley's last known words. The chapter ends with the wreck on the bottom of Lake Superior, and the men still inside, and the lake refusing to give up its dead. Paul read this chapter to me in 1989, on a winter evening, in the living room. I did not know then that he was reading me his own future. It is enough. It has to be. And on a morning like this, with the lake doing what the lake does and the dog at my feet and the bread on the counter and the kitchen warm enough to live in, it is. I have been thinking about the kitchen as a kind of slow-moving river. The river has carried things for a hundred and fifty years now — Mormor's recipes from Uppsala, brought across the Atlantic in steerage in the 1880s; Mamma's adaptations of those recipes for the cold of Minnesota; my own modifications, picked up over fifty years; the small experiments my granddaughters bring home from cooking shows they watch on phones. The river keeps moving. I am one bend in it. There will be others. It is enough.

The pumpkin bread was for the week’s weight — the silence, the wood pile, the soup ladle, the Edmund Fitzgerald chapter read one more time. But I keep gluten-free banana muffins in my rotation for the same reason I keep the coffee on before the lake is even visible: they are steady, they ask very little, and they are better the second morning than the first, eaten cold or barely warm with a thin press of butter. I started making them for Mamma, whose digestion no longer tolerates wheat, and they stayed because they belong here, in this kitchen, in this light. Some recipes earn their place not by occasion but by constancy — and constancy, I have learned, is its own kind of love.

Gluten-Free Banana Muffins

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 22 minutes | Total Time: 32 minutes | Servings: 12 muffins

Ingredients

• 3 large ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 1/4 cups)
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup coconut oil, melted and cooled
• 3 tablespoons pure maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups gluten-free all-purpose flour blend (with xanthan gum)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven. Heat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Line a standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners or grease each cup well with coconut oil.
2. Mash the bananas. In a large mixing bowl, mash the ripe bananas thoroughly with a fork until only small lumps remain. The riper and more spotted the bananas, the sweeter and more flavorful your muffins will be.
3. Mix the wet ingredients. Add the eggs, melted coconut oil, maple syrup, and vanilla extract to the mashed bananas. Whisk together until well combined and smooth.
4. Whisk the dry ingredients. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the gluten-free flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt until evenly distributed.
5. Combine gently. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir with a spatula or wooden spoon until just combined — do not overmix. A few small lumps are fine. Fold in walnuts if using.
6. Fill the muffin cups. Divide the batter evenly among the 12 prepared muffin cups, filling each about 3/4 full.
7. Bake. Bake on the center rack for 20 to 22 minutes, until the tops are golden and a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs.
8. Cool. Let the muffins rest in the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack. They slice and hold together best once fully cooled. Stored in an airtight container, they are — as with most quick breads — best the second day.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 148 | Protein: 3g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 21g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 138mg