Paleo Roasted Banana Bread and Practical Kitchens

My collection of hoarded black bananas in the back of my freezer emerged to yield another loaf of my favorite quick bread. I love all things banana (evidence here, here and here)! This time, purely out of curiosity, I decided to give Paleo banana bread a try. Over Christmas break, my mom brought several pounds of almond meal and coconut flour and sugar home for me. She can get it vastly cheaper in Texas than I can in Missouri for some reason, but why dwell when you have this to look at every morning:

Squee! Over the three-day weekend I finally took time to clean out the kitchen and reorganize everything more closely to how we use the kitchen. When we first moved in, everything just went wherever there was an open slot and since we had people helping us, things kind of went where they were unpacked. A huge part of my time was definitely spent on the baking supplies:

Our kitchen remodel is definitely going re-apportion some of our supplies and change the way we store them. Since we’re buying more bulk foods, and using more glass containers, I’m hoping we can ditch some cabinets for open shelving. For now though, I managed to fit all the baking stuff in one cabinet. It’s a tight fit, but as I use up some non-Paleo friendly baking supplies, they won’t be replaced.

One of the big things I’m coming to terms with as we plan for our remodel is how practical our kitchen needs to be. I’ve literally pinned hundreds of gorgeous kitchen photos (sorry followers!) over the past few months, but the closer we get to pulling the trigger, the more I realize how impractical many of them are.

Our kitchen is constantly in a state of prep, cooking or clean-up. Since we prepare everything from raw ingredients, having cute stuff adorning the counters is just more stuff I have to wipe down every night. We’ve recently started experimenting with fermentation, so on any one day our counter looks like a giant creepy science experiment. There are dishes always drying, appliances too often used to put away and vegetables from one end to the other. While I think making the “bones” of our kitchen attractive, the original magazine-worthy image I had in mind is being replaced with a hippie-industrial concoction…

I guess that’s why you buy right? So you can do whatever the hell you want!

But anyhow, back to my bananas. I adapted a few things from Elana’s recipe. First I roasted my bananas before adding them to the mix (350 degrees for 15-20 minutes). I broke up the almond flour into half almond flour and half coconut flour. I added an additional teaspoon or so of vanilla and a teaspoon or two of cinnamon. I also freaked because I thought the dough was too dry and added 1/4 cup of coconut milk at the last minute.

It turned out great, but not at all how I expected. The batter had the consistency of cookie dough, so much so that I freaked and added some coconut milk at the last minute hoping to soften it. I’m glad I did. The final product was very dense, so much so I had to have a glass of coconut milk to wash it down with. Very tasty though, definitely something I would make again!