This Chocolate Banana Bread with Coconut Caramel Has a Secret

Plus: Pizzas at Oma Grassa, Salad with Grapes and Blue Cheese, and a Solid Bean Soup.

Hey everyone,

Our friends Ryan, Kristen, and Clem are visiting from Seattle and staying with us. They arrived yesterday and we started by walking Winston to Cobble Hill Park to give them a lay of the land.

Then, back here, I cooked dinner; but not just any dinner: a gluten-free, dairy-free dinner with a mind-bogglingly delicious dessert.

Wait, did you hear that right? Gluten-free + dairy-free = mind-bogglingly delicious? Yup; because I was cooking from Gregory Gordet’s Everyone’s Table, which is turning out to be one of my most-used cookbooks.

It’s from this book that I got the cashew hummus recipe that I made last week and then made once again for our visiting friends.

I’d never made the banana bread, but I was intrigued: especially because there’s so many smart workarounds that not only help you avoid the dairy and the gluten, they enhance the flavor with the prominence of coconut.

True: you will buy many new flours to make this recipe. I’m now holding space (in my kitchen cabinet) for tapioca flour, coconut flour, and almond flour. If anyone has any suggestions for what else I can do with them, please sound off in the comments!

The star of this recipe is the coconut caramel which you make by cooking coconut milk with sugar until it gets really thick. Then, after you mix chocolate chips and walnuts into the batter…

You pour it into your prepped pan and spoon the coconut caramel on top. When you bake it, it turns all brown and bubbly and gives the finished banana bread a shellacked top that makes it extra special.

Here’s a video I made of the whole process:

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And here’s the recipe as a PDF:

Coconutbananabread

73KB ∙ PDF file

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Download

Let me know what you think.

On Saturday, we met our friends Jeremy and Jason for pizza at Oma Grassa in Fort Greene.

Eric Kim was raving about it the other night at drinks and since I love pizza, it was kind of a no-brainer. (Though I did realize, after I made the reservation, that it was Passover and that pizza is leavened. Don’t tell my mom!)

We added sausage to the mushroom pizza, which was a good move suggested by the waiter:

And this pizza with mussels on it was far-out:

(Now realizing we also ate shellfish and pork… oy.)

While all the toppings were excellent, my favorite part was the crust. It was charred in spots, chewy in spots, crunchy in others. And everything paired well with this “gluggable” red, suggested by the waiter:

In case you think it’s all pizza and banana bread, I made a simple salad the other day with radicchio and butter lettuce, olive oil and balsamic, only I also added grapes, toasted cashews, and blue cheese. It was super tasty.

And in case you’re wondering what I served the gluten-free, dairy-free crowd last night, I made a super simple bean soup using Rancho Gordo’s Christmas Limas, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, bay leaves, tomato paste, kale, and some toasted sourdough garlic bread on the side (for those who did eat gluten).

Hey, let’s look at some links:

• Jeffery Self’s Grub Street Diet is highly entertaining (Grub Street);

• Kim Chi (the drag queen) has a cookbook coming out! (Eater);

• This chicken meatball wrap looks good (Taste).

That’s all for today, folks.

I don’t want to jinx it, but it finally feels a bit like spring outside? Time to head out to see for myself.

See you back here on Thursday….

Your pal,

Adam