Honey Glazed Pumpkin Banana Bread

September. The first September alone. The word "alone" keeps arriving in my vocabulary like a guest I invited but wasn't sure would come. Alone at the farmers market, buying kabocha for one adult and one child. Alone at the yoga studio, which has partially reopened, masked and distanced, five students instead of fifteen, the room echoing with the space between bodies. Alone at the kitchen table, writing blog posts, the laptop warm on my knees, the apartment quiet, the quiet a gift.

I made kabocha nimono — the fall simmered squash, the ritual dish, the return of the season — and served it in the chipped bowl and ate it at the small table by the window and the taste was autumn, the way autumn has always tasted in my kitchen: dashi and soy sauce and sweet squash surrendering to heat. The taste was the same. The table was smaller. The life was different. The kabocha does not know about the divorce. The kabocha simmers regardless.

Miya started a new preschool arrangement — a small pandemic pod, four children, in a teacher's home, three days a week. She adapted immediately, the way she adapts to everything: with Ken's calmness and Barbara's directness and a resilience that I envy and also take partial credit for. She told the other children, "I have two houses," as if describing an interesting fact about geography. The children were unimpressed. Four-year-olds live in a world where two houses is less interesting than a caterpillar, and the caterpillar perspective is, honestly, healthier than most adult perspectives on divorce.

I called Ken and told him about the separation. He was quiet for a long time — Ken-quiet, the kind of quiet that has weather systems inside it — and then he said, "Your mother and I should have done it sooner." It was the most intimate thing Ken Nakamura has ever said to me about his marriage, and it arrived in the space between one breath and the next, and I held it the way I hold the chipped bowl: carefully, knowing it is fragile, knowing it is irreplaceable. He did not say he was proud of me. He said something better. He said: you are braver than I was. He said it in Nakamura, in the language of silences and sentences-that-mean-other-sentences, and I heard it clearly, the way I hear dashi beneath miso. My father is proud of me. My father told me so, in the only language he speaks.

The kabocha nimono had already done its work—the ritual of it, the sameness of the taste against the differentness of everything else—and what I wanted after, what the apartment’s quiet asked for, was something that could bake while Miya napped, something that would fill the rooms with the smell of autumn and not require me to be anyone in particular. Pumpkin banana bread felt exactly right: familiar flavors repurposed into something new, a little sweetness from honey, the whole thing unhurried. My father said I was braver than he was. I think bravery, sometimes, looks like choosing to fill a small kitchen with warmth on a September afternoon, for no audience except yourself and one four-year-old who will declare it “pretty good” and ask for more.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 60 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes | Servings: 10 slices

Ingredients

1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
2 very ripe medium bananas, mashed (about 3/4 cup)
2 large eggs
1/3 cup honey, plus 2 tablespoons for glaze
1/4 cup neutral oil (such as avocado or light olive oil)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Instructions

Preheat & prepare pan. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C). Lightly grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan and line with a strip of parchment paper, leaving an overhang on the long sides for easy lifting.
Mix wet ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the pumpkin puree, mashed bananas, eggs, 1/3 cup honey, oil, and vanilla extract until smooth and fully combined.
Combine dry ingredients. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves.
Fold together. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold gently with a spatula until just combined—a few streaks of flour are fine. Do not overmix, as this toughens the loaf.
Bake. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 55 to 65 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs. If the top browns too quickly, tent loosely with foil after 40 minutes.
Glaze & cool. Remove the loaf from the oven and immediately brush the top generously with the remaining 2 tablespoons of honey. Allow the bread to cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then use the parchment overhang to lift it onto a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Honey Glazed Pumpkin Banana Bread — What the Kabocha Season Carries Forward