Flourless Banana Oat Muffins (Gluten free and still comforting!)

Very few things are as satisfying to me on a gloomy day than trying a successful recipe which is both healthy and tastes good. Relatively healthy - I mean, let’s be honest -it’s a muffin recipe. I made some adjustments to the recipe to use ingredients I had or could find in the store at an affordable price. This recipe called for whole milk, but I used 2% because when it comes to whole milk, this homey don’t play that. What would this calorie conscious lady do with the rest of the gallon of milk? I pictured myself putting on a bonnet and walking around my neighborhood with a saucer of the whole milk I refuse to drink, looking for orphaned kittens to feed it to. This seems like not very practical because I would have to buy a bonnet and since Amazon would not consider it an essential purchase, it it would be delivered after my whole milk had gone bad. Even if I could procure a bonnet, since I recently wore a bunny costume and sat on my steps to take an Easter video for the children I work with and my nieces, I think it wise to not don unusual fashion choices for at least another week. I have a good friend who is gluten free so when I see a gluten free recipe which would taste nothing like the astronaut rations you can buy in the gift shop of the Smithsonian, I try it. I have more free time than she does and I enjoy discovering recipes which will add something to the lives of people other than me. If making again I would probably add another banana and more cinnammon. I am not gluten free but I am kind of sensitive to overly processed simple starches, so I’ll definitely bake a version of these again.

Baking desert breads is something which my grandmothers always did and I have memories of my Mamma’s banana bread, better than mine, served at Sunday brunch after Mass. In my house we had a Sunday morning ritual during childhood when, while eggs were being cooked in the kitchen, my Dad would hand us sections of the NY Sunday times he reserved at the legendary corner store/watering hole. We would plow through articles on NY Fashion week and international conflict, and then we would eat plates of eggs, sometimes cooked the Irish way in bacon drippings, banana bread (if we had some in the house), Saturday’s baked potatoes made into Sunday’s home fries and talk about what we heard in church or what our week ahead looked like. As we got older, (and we thought we got cooler) we were not so big on volunteering information about our lives, which is pretty typical as far as child development goes. I might not have been a big talker about what homework I had left to do, but I looked forward to the Sundays for the Sunday Times, because it contained the NY Times magazine and William Safire, who gave me permission to have a love of language for language’s sake.

Often I think cooking and baking are similar to writing, as there are some hard and fast framework type laws which govern both, but the people who kill it in the kitchen and on the page, are people who can nimbly navigate the framework and create something which resonates truthfully and beautifully with others, but is authentically their own. I encourage you to make these muffins and make your own Sunday morning ritual which celebrates the marriage of food, your family as you define it and language, which seems authentic to you and yours.

Ingredients

3 cups of oats

2 medium over ripe bananas (peeled and mashed)

2 tsp of baking powder

cup of milk (I used 2%-

cup of Greek yogurt (plain or vanilla)

vanilla (tsp if your use vanilla yogurt, and 2 tsp if you use plain)

1/3 cup of maple syrup

sprinkling of cinnamon

0.5 tsp of salt

Plan of Attack

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

Mash the bananas and add all the ingredients together

Let the mixture sit for 5-6 minutes so the oats absorb the milk.

Pour the batter into your muffin tin and bake (30 minutes for a traditional muffin pan and 40-50 minutes for massive 6 muffin pans)

Serve and enjoy!