The Smiling Banana

Hello all!

I am a little behind on my updates (sorry!) I’m still getting the hang of my blogging schedule, but I’m so excited to really reach out to people through the kitchen and the quest for good health!

Sorry to get all cliche on you, but I really mean it. So anyway, here’s my edible recap for, um, I think it was Thursday. But I’m not totally sure.

So I got up, made my perfected microwave oats, and topped it with…

…banana slices to form a smiley face. (I know it’s corny, but isn’t it nice to dive into a happy looking breakfast?)

I also topped it with some AMAZING organic strawberries I got at the Farmer’s Market a few days ago. (I took pictures, and I hope I can get them up soon.)

My oats are still smiling, but they’re just smiling under a layer of strawberries. No problemo.

So anyway, I went to school and basked in the fact that school was almost over but, since I’m not even sure what day this was, I’m also not too sure what else I did that day. I had a Fuji apple for lunch with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made with some of that amazing peanut butter I made yesterday.

But for dinner, my mom comes home with a bunch of red snapper and asks me to do something with it. Great.

Not that I had a problem with that, I love cooking for my mom and snapper is such a great ingredient. So I got creative.

My mom loves Rice Krispy cereal, so I thought I’d crust it with that. This can either turn out really well, or in a frantic call to the local Chinese takeout place. Here goes nothing…

Krispy Krust Snapper with Lemon Dijon Dipping Sauce

1/2 lb. of Red Snapper

1 cup of Rice Krispy Cereal (or any other crisp rice cereal)

1/4t salt

1/2 cup liquid egg whites (or about 2-3 actual egg whites)

1/2 lemon

Dijon mustard

salt and pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Place cereal and salt in a blender or food processor and pulse until slightly more than coarsely chopped. Transfer to bowl or shallow dish and set aside.

Pour egg whites into a bowl or shallow dish and set aside. Season snapper with salt and pepper. Coat both sides of snapper with egg whites and dredge in cereal mixture.

Transfer to a baking dish coated with nonstick spray. (I used nonstick tin foil to avoid cleanup.) Bake in oven at 450 degrees F for 20-30 minutes, or until fish flakes with a fork. Sorry to be so vague about baking times, but my oven is kinda old. It’s a trooper, but the baking temps and times are kinda off, so I usually can’t be overly precise about baking times. As long as you check pretty frequently around the time it should be done, you should be fine.

To make sauce, squeeze the juice from the half lemon into a small dish or bowl. Feel free to use a schmancy juicer, but I just held the lemon over the dish and juiced it the old fashioned way. (I just squeezed it until it looked like the juice was out of the lemon. Easy-peasy.) Either way, just make sure there are no seeds in the dish.

Zest about a teaspoon of the lemon ring into the dish. The reason I didn’t give a measurement for the Dijon is because I just stirred it into the lemon juice until it reached a pretty thick consistency.

Serve snapper with some kind of veggie and the sauce for dipping. Dig in!