SOMETHING SIMPLE: Gluten-Free Pumpkin Muffins

Starting sometime in my early 20s, I was seized by a desire to start eating healthier — burgeoned partly by the splendid farmers’ markets where I was living in Northern California, and partly by the profusion of food blogs I read ravenously throughout the 2010s. As a result, I went through a protracted phase in which I made my own everything.

I’m talking homemade yogurt, bread, and even mayonnaise. I brewed kombucha at home, using a slightly dubious method I learned through some now-defunct online forum for new vegans. I soaked almonds overnight, then blended and pressed them through paint-strainer bags to make almond milk. I bought seeds in bulk and ground them up to bake into crackers — which I ate with hummus made from slow-cooked dried chickpeas and, yes, homemade tahini.

My grocery list included absolutely nothing from a box, jar, or can. I’m not sure I even owned a can opener.

I don’t regret any of it — those years taught me a lot of indispensable health skills. They nurtured my love of cooking and my curiosity about where my food comes from — and set me on the path to my job at Experience Life.

But like a lot of people who start out just wanting to eat a little better, I looked up one day and realized that my life had become impossibly, even frighteningly, small: I was bound to an ever-expanding number of rules that governed my eating habits and hamstrung by the diminishing list of foods that I could let myself enjoy.

Back then, were I making these muffins, I’d have roasted and puréed a pumpkin and eschewed the canned stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that — roasted squash might be my favorite cold-weather food. But while hacking open a winter squash to roast is, in my humble opinion, infinitely worth the effort for the savory recipes starting featured at “How to Cook With the Three Sisters,” I don’t think the same is always true for baked goods.

That’s because baking is something of a science, comprising precise measurements of specific ingredients and both chemical and physical reactions. (Of course, there’s also a fair bit of art involved — the moment a carefully kneaded loaf of bread is ready to go into the oven, for instance, is as much a feeling as it is a measurement — but that’s a topic for another time.)

When you’re baking, consistency matters, and on that front, your favorite brand of canned pumpkin has done the hard work for you. A single brand contains roughly the same amount of moisture in every can. But because water content varies from gourd to gourd, using homemade purée has as much chance of rendering dense, gloppy muffins as light, fluffy ones.

It was a tough lesson for me to learn, but it’s true: Making something from scratch doesn’t always mean better results.

I still make a lot of those same homemade foods on occasion — ­because I love to cook, and I still want to avoid the preservatives, artificial flavors, and excess packaging that often come with processed fare. But I also buy hummus from the grocery store sometimes, because there is a whole wide world outside of my kitchen and I want to spend my time living in it.

The line between healthy habits and obsessive fixation probably looks different for each of us. For me, figuring out how to feed myself well while still living a vibrant, active life meant accepting foods I’d once considered verboten. When I released myself from the limiting dogma that processed equals bad, my world grew so much bigger and brighter. I even realized that there are quite a few shortcut convenience foods that — far from being unhealthy — actually enable a more bountiful life than I could have imagined for myself back when I first started learning what healthy eating really means.