SPREADING THELOVE

If you’re a peanut butter fan, these muffins with a nutty flavor and banana bread vibe will hit the sweet spot, and they’re just the right size

Ilove peanut butter, especially freshly ground peanut butter. Although we always have commercially processed big-name peanut butter in the house (Auntie loves Skippy), I use it only in a pinch. Most brand-name peanut butter has added oils and sugar, watering down the natural peanut flavor. So I always have peanuts on hand to grind, or peanut butter like Laura Scudder’s Natural Peanut Butter — just peanuts and a bit of salt — for a backup. I also love virtually all foods with peanut butter as an ingredient.

One example, though, for ourselves for mealtime has my Auntie saying “hard during the week, but we pass” because the combination often cooked for each other is just too strange for on weekends. her. When I was in my 20s, I One day, my roommate had a roommate from Texas said she was making spaghetti who introduced me to new chili, which had me foods; many were Tex-Mex, and our other roommate and others were recipes her scratching our heads. We family had been making all sat at the counter drinking her life. We usually fended our wine while she cooked,

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declining our offer of assistance. She pulled out a couple of cans of chili and dumped them into a pot. I am no stranger to using store-bought ingredients and doctoring them to freshen them up and give them more depth, so when she proceeded to add heaping spoonfuls of peanut butter, it was a lightbulb moment for me. Having grown up watching my mother make mole where she added peanut butter, I knew that peanut butter and chiles complemented each other well. Our other roommate was a dance student from Mexico, so she, too, was not thrown off by this ingredient. Spaghetti chili is now one of my favorite comfort pantry meals.

I recently shared a banana bread recipe that I started making years ago, in which I added grated Mexican chocolate. That recipe and my love of peanut butter inspired today’s share. One evening, I felt a bit peckish and went into the kitchen searching for something to satisfy my sweet tooth. I lived alone then and rarely had ready-made snacks in the house. If I really craved a snack, I’d have to take the time to make it. Often, that was enough to deter me, and I’d settle on a piece of fruit or crunchy sugar snap peas to munch on.

This particular evening, I was determined to make something. Eyeing my container of freshly ground peanut butter on the counter got me thinking of cookies. But I wasn’t really in a cookie mood. Then I realized I had a nice black banana in the refrigerator that I needed to use soon. So I decided to experiment, and these banana, peanut butter and bourbon muffins were the result. And as is my norm, whenever I experiment with new recipes, I took my efforts to work the next day. They got two thumbs up all around.

I’m calling these “muffins,” but I didn’t use a muffin tin. I rarely do, as my guilt from eating a large muffin in one sitting is often too much for me to handle. I use cupcake tins. Plus, for years, I didn’t have the space for both cupcake and muffin tins, and that’s probably the case for many folks. A cupcake-size muffin is more manageable and less guilt-inducing. If you prefer full-size muffins, you’ll find no judgment here. Just remember to adjust the baking time.