There are dishes which we associate with particular extras. In my home a joint of meat has always been served with potatoes and horseradish or mustard; frikadelles with carrot and peas; and fish with sauerkraut. Even though I can imagine that roast chicken is excellent with fried beetroot, I will automatically serve it with lettuce and cream, and pork chops with cucumber salad.

Cooking stereotypes, or if you prefer - traditions, are nice to follow, but without a bit of madness there wouldn't be so many interesting and surprising combinations. Today I would like to share with you another way to serve traditional frikadelles. Of course, hamburgers aren't my idea (which is a pity because the financial profits would let me sleep better) and I associate them mostly with fast food restaurants. In pictures they look beautiful, but in reality we often get a sandwich which looks like somebody sat on it. Try to prepare it yourself at home. Your children will be delighted with this kind of dinner.

Apparently, hamburgers should be made from beef. Each to his own. I prefer something more exquisite so I use turkey. Choose for yourself. You can bake the roll at home or buy your favourite. I chose a kaiser roll with sesame seeds because we like them the most.

Ingredients:
frikadelles
350g of mince turkey
1 small onion
1 clove of garlic
250ml of milk
1 egg
1 dry kaiser roll
1 teaspoon of herby pepper
breadcrumbs
salt

When we have at home a fussy little eater who doesn't like any food, we try to find dishes to change our difficult situation at the table. A few parents, like me, try to prepare a varied diet for the little fusspot, even though he would prefer to eat tomato soup, borscht and crepes with sweet cottage cheese.

There are many different ways of smuggling fruit and vegetables, healthy groats and granary products into meals. For me, one of these ways is various types of pikelets. Fortunately, regardless of their ingredients, pikelets are accepted without grizzling, which means I can experiment with fruit, vegetables and groats. "Pikelet" is the magic word for a peaceful dinner or supper.

This time I smuggled some millet groats (whose health properties are obvious) into some mild pikelets. The recipe comes from the book "Succulent pikelets" by ZPR Media SA publisher. The original recipe suggests serving the pikelets with a bit of peanut butter or chocolate. I served them with natural yoghurt and fruit. I must admit they were really yummy.

Ingredients:
100g of millet groats
2 bananas
2 eggs
half a teaspoon of cinnamon
oil for frying

Chocolate is an essential product in my home. We can live without soap or eggs, but without chocolate we are in trouble. Maybe this is why chocolate is so difficult to replace. If we fancy a piece of chocolate (let's say only one piece because it sounds better), it must be chocolate and nothing else. I think for this reason we like everything that is connected with chocolate: cakes, cookies, desserts, glazes and others. Recently, my daughter asked me for some chocolate cake. The common chocolate cake called "murzynek" didn't seem to have enough chocolate, so I decided to prepare the most chocolaty cake I know, i.e. a brownie.

Because flour is not, like chocolate, the most important product, the empty jar laughed at me from the cupboard. I held my ground however, and I discovered that it is possible to use chickpeas instead of flour. I was relieved to discover it did not change the taste of the cake. The brownie was prepared. It took a bit longer because I needed to blend the dough, but you can go the extra mile if on the horizon there is a moist-on-the-inside, crunchy-on-the-outside brownie with chickpeas.
The recipe comes from the book "Legumes" by Maria Banach. In the original recipe you should chop up the chocolate and mix it with the rest of the ingredients. I melted the chocolate in a bain-marie to blend the mass more easily.

Ingredients:
1 tin of chickpeas
125g of brown sugar
250g of dark chocolate
1 banana
1 tablespoon of coconut oil
2 eggs
2 teaspoons of baking powder

Sometimes you simply have to chow down on some snacks. A good book, an interesting movie, a meeting with friends; the snacks disappear without trace in a moment. Crunchy snacks, crisps, nuts and salty sticks have an unusual property: You reach out for the first one and suddenly the bowl is empty regardless of how many snacks there were at the beginning. There is no point discussing the nutritional value of salty snacks, because of course we don't eat them to follow a sensible diet . Sometimes one just has to do it.

Today I would like to share with you a recipe for snacks which you can prepare at home in a jiffy. This dish tastes best hot, so I propose making it together with friends. A bottle of red wine, which is excellent for finger rolls with French pastry, can be opened even earlier 

The finger rolls are also great for cream soup, which we often serve with croutons. To prepare finger rolls we need basil pesto. Try to make it yourself – it isn't so difficult. When you don't have enough time or you don't like cooking, use ready pesto from a jar.

I found the recipe for finger rolls in the online Lidl cookery book.

Ingredients:
pesto:
a tuft of basil
20 g of cashew nuts
100 g of grated parmesan
1 clove of garlic
4 tablespoons of olive oil
salt and pepper

Sometimes we find a recipe so splendid in its simplicity that we wonder why we didn't come across it earlier. We try it, and the prepared dish is like a poem. Then we would like to say the same as Mr. Zagłoba (one of the main characters in the most important Polish Trilogy by Henryk Sienkiewicz): "I, in all modesty, did it". This time it was the same.

In a culinary magazine I found an autumn recipe by Agnieszka Maciąg for baked white sausage with vegetables. Inspired, I prepared my own version of this dish. I didn't buy raw white sausage, which is a good idea because preparing the meal with ready white sausages is significantly less time consuming. You can use raw ones, but they take longer to bake.

Ingredients:
6 white sausages
1 red pepper
1 small courgette
2 shallots
4 cloves of garlic (in shells)
2 bunches small tomatoes
4 sprigs of rosemary
1 lemon
2 tablespoon of row sesame oil