Blueberries. What a happy word. How could you say that word and not smile? Go ahead. Say it out loud.

Blueberries are a Maine summer thing. Blueberries and lobsters. Say THAT out loud. A hot boiled lobster with melted butter, and a piece of warm blueberry pie for dessert. Okay I’ll stop. Now I’m starving.

Blueberry pie is simple. You don’t need a recipe for that. Pie crust, blueberries and sugar. Duh.

Blueberry banana muffins are simple too, but they require a little more work. Not much. I'm pretty sure my mother invented this recipe, but it wouldn’t take a Julia Child to come up with it.

You basically just take a good banana bread recipe and throw in some blueberries. Pretty simple, but the combination of banana flavor and blueberries is out of this world, pure toothsome scrumminess.

Mum has been making these during the summer, at the cottage, for as long as I can remember. I’m thinking they started one morning when she was making banana bread, and there was a handful of the blueberries I had pilfered from our neighbors’ field, left over from the blueberry pie she had made the night before.

She can’t stand waste, so she threw them in the mix, then decided to make muffins instead of bread. Voila! A new recipe was born. Her resolve to never throw food away led to another of her favorite concoctions when I was a kid, too: Garbage soup. Use your imagination.

Uh oh. I should have left well enough alone. I just Googled blueberry banana muffins. They’re all over the internet. Probably originated in that little 100-year-old cottage though, right? Word of mouth. A LOT of people have had her blueberry banana muffins over the years :-)

Anyway.

I pilfer blueberries from the huge field overlooking the St. George River in Cushing where we're not supposed to be picking them anymore, but I simply can't help myself. I stay near the edges where the commercial rakers don’t usually go. What am I supposed to do? Let them rot? I am my mother’s daughter.

The field actually belongs to old friends my family has known for, like, 100 years. My mother picked blueberries there when she was a kid, and I have, pretty much every other summer, my whole life. Wild Maine blueberries don't produce every year. They grow every other year.

Blueberries, wild and cultivated grow all over the world, but Maine is the largest producer, according to umaine.edu.

So it’s not like the two or three thousand I pick are going to have any negative impact.

Sally Thompson (now Sarah Foster) was one of the family members who owned the field when I was growing up. Most of them were from Connecticut, and took turns at their summer place in Cushing over the summers.

Sal ol’ Pal, as I liked to call her, used to pick blueberries with me. She owned them, and I was her summer bestie. The field is a short walk through the woods, along a well-worn path between the cottage and Sal’s and her cousins’, aunts’ and uncles’ “farm,” really an old cape with acres and acres that border on the St. George River.

Sal and I rarely wore anything on our feet in those days. We walked up the dirt road to visit Christina Olson. We walked the path through the woods between our places. We walked over the rocks and seaweed along the shore. We picked blueberries. All with bare feet. Our feet were always black (with dirt) and blue (with blueberry juice).

We even went barefoot when we went into Thomaston when Mum needed to go to the laundromat. No washing machine at the cottage. Still isn’t. We were thrilled when we got a shower.

So enough about dirty feet. ADD. This is a food column.

Here’s the recipe for Mum’s blueberry banana muffins. Believe me, they’re the Best. Muffins. Ever.

Smash up 2 overripe bananas (MUCH more flavor than simply ripe ones). Throw in an egg and whip it all up. Add: 1/2 cup sugar (or a little less - overripe bananas are sweet), and 1/3 cup canola oil, then blend 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. baking soda, 1/2 tsp. salt into 1 1/2 cups flour, and throw that in. Mix. Throw in as many blueberries as you want to, and bake in a muffin tin at 400 for 20 to 25 minutes.

And for godssake if you don’t eat the whole dozen in one sitting, stick them in a freezer bag and throw them in the freezer. Then cut in half, horizontally, and toast. Slather with butter. Eat the top first. Save the best for last.

And if it’s after noontime, have a manhattan with it. By the way, I’ve been making them with my new favorite bourbon, Basil Hayden’s. Thank you John Suczynski.

“For many families in Maine, it’s a rite of passage – a tradition that is passed down through generations that comes to define summer in a region that holds the season itself and its bounty dear.” That’s a quote about picking blueberries from the wildblueberries.com website. I really have no choice but to carry on that tradition :-)

Don’t forget to email me with questions or compliments, or if you want to argue about whether the muffin bottom is better than the muffin top: suzithayer@boothbayregister.com.