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Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins

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I have a few staple recipes committed to memory because I make them so often. These muffins are one of them 🙂

It’s a gluten-free treat that will satisfy any sweet tooth. Plus, bananas provides potassium, almond provides protein, chocolate chips provide… well, not much on the nutritional side of things. But they sure are tasty!

So tasty, in fact, that half the batch is usually gone by the next morning. Great as breakfast, midday snack or post-dinner treat.

Substitutions

You could nix the chocolate chips for a healthier version, and it would still come out sweet. The best bananas are the ones teetering the edge of too ripe to eat. The riper, the sweeter. You could also opt for a PB&J muffin, swapping the chocolate out for fruit preserves, as shown below.

 

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins
 
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Serves: 12
Ingredients
  • 3-4 medium bananas, mashed
  • 3 eggs, whisked
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • ½ cup almond butter
  • ⅓ cup almond flour
  • ¼ cup chocolate chips
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • pinch of salt
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine bananas, eggs, almond butter, vanilla extract. Mix well.
  3. Add almond flour, chocolate chips, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Mix well.
  4. Spoon batter into lined or greased muffin pan. I use silicone cups.
  5. Bake 25-30 mins, or until toothpick comes out clean.

 

The Delights and Versatility of Sherry

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No other wine offers a range of styles quite like Sherry.

Admittedly, I never bothered to touch the stuff until a few years ago. My perception of Sherry? Cheap, sticky-sweet, and awful — an alternative to vodka for those whose sole ambition was to become as inebriated as possible in the shortest amount of time.

But that’s not fair to Sherry. Not given a fair chance, she is still wildly ignored today because of her undeserved, unsavory reputation.

For starters, most Sherry wine is dry. Yes, sweet and tacky versions abound, but there are quality-driven dessert Sherry deserving of attention. A world of depth and diversity is begging to be discovered. In fact, sherry is often dubbed “the whiskey of wine.”

So let’s dive in, shall we?

Sherry In A Nutshell

Three white grapes used for sherry production — Palomino, Pedro Ximenez, and Moscatel — are grown in the Andalusia region of Southern Spain. Authentic sherry is and can only be made here; any other place of origin is not sherry at all (similar to Champagne, which can only come from the region of Champagne; anything else is sparkling wine.)

Sherry is indeed wine, but it is fortified, in a manner similar to Port. Fortified wine involves adding high-alcohol spirit to a wine, which not only increases the overall alcohol level but also stops fermentation. Depending on when fortification occurs, the halting of fermentation can result in a sweet wine, as is the case with Port.

In Sherry production, the wine is fortified with a mixture of grape spirit and mature Sherry. Depending on the style of sherry being made, the wine is fortified to several degrees. For example, Fino and Manzanilla Sherry will be fermented to 11-12% alcohol, but fortified to about 15%. Oloroso Sherry can be fortified up to 17-22% alcohol.

Without getting overly geeky here, I’ll mention this:  Producers blend Sherry using a solera system, whereby a portion of aged wine is blended with newer wine. With each harvest, new wine is added to the system, and the not-so-new wine blended with the even older wine, and so on. This somewhat complicated but magical maturation process helps maintain consistency in blending, aging, and bottling. By law, Sherry must be aged a minimum of three years but the reality is that most are aged far longer.

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3 Reasons Why Wine Can Be Intimidating

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Where to Start?

Wanting to get “into wine”, but find it intimidating?

Do you freeze for a moment when you’re handed the wine list? Or when you sip a wine and are immediately asked “So what do you think?”

Or maybe you feel overwhelmed at a wine shop with its endless rows of neatly stacked bottles printed with what seems like foreign gibberish?

I’ve been enjoying wine for most of my adult life. And even though I’ve pursued certifications, read dozens of wine books, and love it enough to have launched this quasi-wine blog, none of these have magically given me bionic wine-tasting super-powers.

If you were born with a nose and tastebuds, and if you’re capable of forming an opinion, then there’s absolutely no reason to feel intimidated by wine. It makes me sad when people confess they find wine intimidating. It’s fermented grape juice, for goodness’ sake. Don’t let fermented grape juice intimidate you. And don’t feel the need to ask a “wine expert” whether it’s good or not. Either you like it, or you don’t.

Documentaries like “Somm” haven’t helped with the intimidation factor, either. I was full-throttle into my wine geekery when I saw it, and in all honesty, I was equally fascinated (by how much there was to learn) and disgusted (by the lengths people would go towards earning the distinction of “Master Somm”).  To a casual wine drinker, or to someone mildly interested in wine, I could see how wine “expertise” could be totally off-putting.

Knowledge may be power, but it doesn’t need to come with ego.

Let’s debunk the misconception that a (perceived) lack of wine knowledge precludes wine enjoyment. If Chef Gusteau can proclaim that Anyone Can Cook, then I say, Anyone Can Wine.

My sincere hope is that this post, and this blog at large, will nudge you into a wine journey of your own. Because life is too short to miss out on partaking in the very drink that Jesus chose to be his first miracle.

With that, three reasons that might prevent you from enjoying wine, and why you should let them not:

Reason #1: Foreign terminology

Most people are comfortable with terms like red, white, rose, bubbly, sweet... Anything beyond those descriptors feels like unchartered territory.

My hunch is that most Americans veer to U.S., Australian, and maybe South African wines, for no other reason than that the labels written in crystal-clear English. In other words: not intimidating. Moreover, the varietal is nearly always identified on the label (Chardonnay. Boom. Cabernet. Done.) This is NOT the case with most European wines.

I’ll address commonly used words in the wine world (you’ve heard them before: complexity, structure, acidity, terroir, etc.) — at a later time. For now, let’s talk about European wine-speak as foreign language.

For the love… Reading some of those labels can bring back memories of high school Spanish class, amirite? Or was it French? German? Italian?  Everything sounds kinda familiar but not really…

And for good reason. When you’re reading a wine label from the Old World, you are encountering a language that is not English. Just a sampling of terms you may come across: Brunello di Montalcino, Sangiovese, Taurasi, Gewurtzraminer, Garganega, Sylvaner, Moulin-Ă -Vent, Amontillado, MĂ©thode Traditionelle, Schlössberg, Appassimento, Haut-Brion, Rasteau, Mouvèdre, CrĂ©mant, Tinhof, Moelleux… Gahhhhh!

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