If one day I manage to prepare a new dish that isn't spaghetti, borscht with ravioli or crepes and it disappears from the plates in a nice atmosphere, I will engrave a gold plate and hang it in the kitchen. It will motivate me to cook more. The way my kids push food around the plate with sour faces exasperates me, because right now they don't like tomatoes, courgettes or cucumbers. My frustration reached its zenith when my son was given a homemade cookie. It emerged that he doesn't like ... chocolate mixture. Fortunately, it is just him.

Today I would like to share with you a recipe for homemade candy bars. If you follow this recipe, the bars are quite thick. If you would like them to be a bit slimmer, spread the chocolate mixture on two wafers.

The recipe comes from www.przepisy.pl.

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons of cocoa
200g of butter
100 ml of water
125g of white sugar
125g of brown sugar
400g of milk powder

When we have ingredients in the fridge that seemingly clash with each other, it is worth giving them a chance sometimes. Extraordinary combinations sometimes lead to surprising results. So it was this time. Until recently, beetroots and herring were for me products which did not belong together on one plate.

An excess of baked beetroots and inspiration from http://www.kobieta.pl/gotowanie produced a very tasty supper. Salad with beetroots, herring, red beans and gherkins can be combined at once, but it looks slicker served in layers in a glass.

Ingredients (for two people):
Red layer
3 beetroots
half of a tin of red beans
¼ of a red onion
a half of a big apple
salt and pepper

Strawberries are a sign of summer for me. Every year I await the sweet and excellent smelling fruit along with the holiday season. Indeed, fresh strawberries are irreplaceable, but this year temptation beat me and I bought some frozen fruits. I made an eye-catching but simple dessert from strawberries and natural yoghurt. Robust red strawberry mousse looks beautiful, but you may set this off with other fruits: kiwi or oranges, and in the summer any fresh fruit. For those of you who believe that desserts should always contain chocolate, I propose that you add this homemade chocolate decoration.
The recipe comes from Lidl cookery book.

Ingredients:
Yoghurt layer
200g of natural yoghurt
1 big teaspoon of gelatine
2 teaspoons of caster sugar
100ml of milk

Soak the gelatine in 50 ml of the milk and leave for a while. Heat the milk a bit in a microwave oven and mix until the gelatine is dissolved. Add the rest of the milk and mix it in. Mix the yoghurt with caster sugar, add the milk and mix again. Put the yoghurt layer into some cups and leave in the fridge for 2 hours.

Did you know that it was probably Neanderthals that boiled soup for the first time. They used a hole in the ground for cooking this soup. They covered it with an animal skin, poured in water and added various ingredients. Then they put hot stones into this. It was only in 5000 BC that craftspeople started using ceramic pots for cooking. The oldest of this kind of artefacts were found on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.

I like soups: homemade, fresh, fragrant, with seasonal vegetables. Nothing else warms you up like a plate of hot soup on an autumn or winter day. Today I would like to show you how to change classical barley soup into something new.

Ingredients:
2 carrots
1 parsley root
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon of butter
1 stock cube
1 can of coconut milk
3 potatoes
3 tablespoons of barley groats

Everybody probably knows that Poles don't read much. Apparently, last year, one in three Poles didn't read any books, and one in five doesn't have any volumes at home. Actually, recently you are more likely to meet someone with a phone than with a book. It is not hard to figure out that students read the most, and I would like to believe that this doesn't come from the necessity of studying and writing term papers. It is significant that children whose parents read to them in their first years often get into books. We couldn't ask a child to read if at home it isn't customary and television programmes are the only source of information and entertainment. I think that, among other things, parents are responsible for their children's attitude to reading and whether they will grow up to treat books as the promise of an amazing adventure or as a duty, or even worse, as something to prop up a wobbly table.

I'm not an expert, but I am a mum, and I can share with you my experience of how my daughter became a bookworm. I'm aware that sometimes neither our efforts nor wishful thinking are sufficient. Our young man doesn't like to read. He likes football, tennis or model making. Well, each kid is different, but it is worth trying.

Let's suppose, however, that we do like to read and our sprog has made friends with books. We have bought, borrowed, read and encouraged, and we see the first tentative results of our efforts. A time will come when letters aren't just magical symbols and our child will read signboards and advertising banners. This is the time when we should encourage his interest in self-reading.

What should we do to make the difficult process of self-reading easier?