This year's holiday we spent in the south of Europe, where we feasted on melons and watermelons. Only the shape of the bright red watermelons is reminiscent of the ones you can buy in Poland. These melons were a revelation. I didn't expect that they could taste so much like and have the same colour as honey. They were excellent. Sometimes we had a problem deciding which type to eat.

Despite this, towards the end of the holiday, we wanted our summer fruits again. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, currants and gooseberries - our gardens are amazing and rich with delicacies. It was no wonder that our first step after returning home was towards the fruit market. Hungry people buy with their eyes, so the amount of fruit we purchased was beyond what we were able to eat. As we didn't manage to eat everything, I made a tart with the rest of the fruity treasures. Along with its filling, this cake is distinguished by its thin, not so sweet granary dough. Try it – it is a really tasty combination.

Ingredients:
dough:
250g of whole wheat flour
75g of caster sugar
a pinch of salt
150g of butter
1 egg

I like sightseeing and visiting new places, even though my relatives know that the journey itself doesn't belong to my favorite ways of spending free time. My life would be much easier if I could take Harry Potter's Floo Powder and travel hundreds of kilometers in a minute. We try to avoid going to indoor exhibitions with our kids. We make an exception for unique museums such as those where you may touch the exhibits. I really do not like to run after my children repeating all the time "don't touch", "don't sit here", "don't move it" and catching the disgusted look of the museum's workers. Due to this, at the moment we prefer sightseeing outside. Into this category we may put shows, parks, gardens and open-air museums. I really like the last one in particular. Unfortunately I do not have family in the countryside, where kids could learn that milk, butter, and cream don't grow in supermarkets, cows are not violet and chickens are not Angry Birds. We try to show our kids how and where people used to live and work 50 or 100 years ago. I like very much when my father comes with us to such places. He often knows how the particular exhibits worked and tells interesting stories about them. The kids are all ears.

Lately we discovered that we don't have to travel too far from Warsaw to visit a XIX century village. The nearest Open-Air Museum of Folk and Landowning Culture that we know of lies in Kuligów on the Bug river. The creator and owner of this place, which has been open since 2000, is the ethnography lover Wojciech Urbanowski.

New exhibits have been appearing constantly since the first year it was opened. Today you may see here a forge, a village house, a garner, a barn, a cowshed, a little house for nobility and a coach house. The owner says that the main goal of this museum is to show the surroundings of the house for nobility and the occupations from that time. The horse-drawn vehicles and the occupations connected with them (rope maker, wheeler, smith, and saddler) are the pearls of the exhibition. You can also see a rope maker's and carpenter's workshop, a mangle and a carding mill.

There are at least a few Dinosaur Parks in Poland. Some are big and some are small, but all of them try to take us back to a time on our planet when there were animals the size of houses, there were sharks in the seas as big as buses, and the air was ruled by flying animals the size of small planes. This year we have visited probably the biggest park of this kind in Poland. Jura Park in Krasiejów proposes not only a classic encounter with dinosaur mock-ups; it is also a real time journey, which we made using our imagination, supported by cutting edge technological achievements.

Dinosaur Park is only a little part of what we may see in Krasiejów. We started with the Science and Mankind Evolution Park. This inconspicuous building on the other side of a car park hides a real time machine. Tooled up with helmets like Lord Vader, we observed and listened to stories of mankind's evolution. We flew a space shuttle, we docked at an orbital space station, we went back in time 66 million years where we saw the extinct world of the dinosaurs and other species' shy attempts to colonize the Earth. Flying the space shuttle you have to grip your chair strongly. The kids were overjoyed with these learning techniques and were able to memorize loads of information.

Following this, we passed by the car park and continued our journey through time. I do not know whether you have seen the "Dinosaur Train" cartoon with your children. The dinosaurs can move between different time eras by driving a train through a time tunnel. We were able to experience a similar adventure. Sitting in a time capsule, wearing 3D glasses, we started from the Big Bang and travelled through all the cataclysms and changes which formed the Earth's surface.

The courgette is my favourite vegetable. I always have it in my pantry. I use it to prepare cream-soup or simple vegetable soup with rice. I add courgette with red and yellow peppers to letcho. I like courgettes with green pesto or stuffed courgette with buckwheat groats or with meat. My children like grilled courgette the most. I hope that my new dish will also meet with their approval.

This time my favourite vegetables are accompanied by chanterelles and fresh, strongly aromatic basil. Thanks to these small mushrooms, this exquisite, light green soup acquires an inimitable, gentle, woodsy aroma and interesting look.

The recipe comes from a Lidl cookery book.

Ingredients:
1 courgette
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
3 tablespoons of butter
0.5l of stock