Today I would like to propose strawberries served in a different way. This salad with spinach and strawberries is a real vitamin bomb. It is an excellent proposal for sportsmen and for people watching their waistline.

Spinach is a rich source of vitamins B, A, and E, ascorbic acid and folic acid. Few people know that strawberries contain more ascorbic acid than citrus fruits. Both ingredients of my salad contain quite a lot of calcium, potassium, phosphorus and iron.

Along with the spinach and strawberries, add to the salad some gorgonzola cheese and almonds. If you like you can enrich it with beautiful green pieces of avocado. You just need to sprinkle it with balsamic sauce and it is ready to try. Is it true that whipped cream and sugar goes well with strawberries?

Ingredients:
200 g of spinach
10 strawberries
1 avocado
20 almonds

I spent one week in June just resting. Whoever devised the so-called 'green school' deserves an award. Five whole days of peace – my daughter was out – three days of absolute calm, because some brave nursery teachers took a group of five-year-olds out for green nursery school. The only thing was, this week was strangely short. At the beginning there was Monday and moments later it was Friday. It was a suspicious time warp and I couldn't do anything. My daughter stood on the doorstep and said "Mum, there is a homelike aroma."

Today I would like to share with you a recipe for this homelike aroma. Its secret is the easiest homemade fruitcake that I know. You can use any type of fruit. Most often I make it with plums, but it is also excellent with cherries. Today I chose wild cherries. This cake is fluffy, moist, not too sweet and smells delicious.

Ingredients:
250g of flour
250g of butter
250g of sugar
2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar
4 eggs

Panna cotta is one of the most famous and classical desserts. It comes from north Italy. It is prepared with cream heated with gelatine and other extra ingredients and served with fruit coulis. Even beginner chefs could handle this dessert. Maybe you will persuade your children to make it on their own?

For this dessert you may use seasonal fruits. Right now the best are strawberries but soon, you will be able to use raspberries, blueberries or cherries. Make a thick coulis from some of them and use it for decoration.

Ingredients:
250 ml of 30% sweet cream
250 ml of milk
80 g of sugar
10 g of gelatine
a couple of drops of vanilla essence
leaves of peppermint
0.3 kg of strawberries

It is difficult for me to make peace with the idea of children with disease or physical handicaps. Although sometimes they are in books and movies only and I know that it is fiction, I'm aware that for many families it is a painful reality they have to take on every day. I always admire family, doctors, nurses and volunteers working in hospices, who every day come up against the suffering of children. For this reason, books and movies in which children are wronged are difficult for me. If I can, I try to avoid them.

In Anna Sakowicz's first novel "The Dream Thief" there was already the theme of a children's hospice. The huge dose of optimism of the author led me to believe that everything would end well, despite all the misfortune. I trusted, read, and I wasn't disappointed. The end of this book leaves us with hope.

The beginning of the next book "It is possible" blindsided me. How come? It should be "they lived long and happily ever after"! Death in a novel with such a positive title? It turns out that Anna Sakowicz's books are like life. Sometimes it is beautiful, the sun shining in the sky, a lot of money in our pockets and we have a goal to pursue. Sometimes, unfortunately, we are beset with miseries, which more often than not, come in pairs. We need a lot of inner strength to get through it all.

While on annual leave in Kociewie (ethnic region of Gdansk Pomerania in Poland), the main character of "It is possible", Joanna, has a chance to change her life. She meets many different people along the way: some are amazing and friendly, but there are also vicious and envious characters. Just as in the previous book, we read about intrigues and difficulties which the characters run into. These griefs are so realistic that we are easily convinced that we are involved with them. Together with the characters we fight and try not to give up. Nobody said that it would be easy; we don't know what we will meet at the end of our journey and the ending is not always as good as we would like. Whether it actually is possible – as the title suggests ¬¬– and who Joanna can count on, you get to know when you read the book.

Children in the kitchen make mess, mess and yet more mess. And it is their parents who have to clean it all up. When we let children into the kitchen, we might get something interesting on the plates apart from the mess. Every chef begins with boiling water for tea and with scrambled eggs.

Recently, it has been possible to find a lot of books with recipes for children and beautifully edited cookery books for children. My daughter has had one of them for a long time, and from time to time she reminds herself of it and devises cooking experiments. "Cecylka Knedelek, i.e cookery book for children" is an amazing book. On the one hand it is a very pleasant book with nice stories which you could read in bed. On the other hand it is a treasure trove of recipes imaginatively grouped in colourful chapters. In the yellow-orange parts you can find a recipe for pumpkin pikelet or orange cake without oranges, in the purple part you can find blueberry and blackberry ice cream, and in the green part there is pea soup and broad bean paste. There is also colourful food with fruit under a warm cover and vegetable soup.

Preparing some parts of the dishes requires parental attention, but other parts children can prepare themselves.

Cooking has many benefits for children. It is a crafty way of getting them to trying new flavours, get to know amazing ingredients and, leastways with some children, to clean up the kitchen. After the demands of cooking, young chefs will maybe appreciate our efforts a bit more and maybe they will be less fussy.

Today, using one of the "red recipes", my children prepared chocolate strawberries.