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

Today I would like to share with you a "social" recipe. Rolls with French pastry are excellent as starters before dinner or a not-so-heavy-but-tasty supper. They were created from expedience on the occasion of an unplanned party with our friends. You can add what you like to them. Mushrooms, ham, cheese – as many options as you have favourite products and what you actually have in the fridge. They are best hot and fragrant, taken out at once from the oven. We like them without anything added (except maybe a glass of red wine), but you can prepare a yoghurt-garlic dip and they will also be exquisite.

Ingredients:
1 pack of chilled French pastry
1 medium courgette
half a red pepper
half an onion
2 cloves of garlic
100g of cottage goat cheese
3 tablespoons of milk
1 teaspoon of butter
salt and pepper

Above all, holidays give me the opportunity to prepare things which I don't have enough time for during the school year. Crumpets, pikelets, crepes and cookies; when else could we prepare them if not during our spare time, when we don't have any projects, homework and a pile of clothes to iron? Of course during the holiday, we need some time for ourselves and we are not always happy to cook, but each to his own. The kitchen is exactly the right place for some people to wind down.

Pouncing on the last days of the winter holiday, I prepared afternoon tea, at the sight of which not only my children's eyes lit up. Fairly simple small pikelets with vanilla fromage frais and caster sugar, jam or yoghurt and fruit are mild and fluffy and bring back the lazy holiday afternoons at my grandmother's in the country.

Ingredients (8 pikelets)
200g of vanilla fromage frais
6 tablespoons of flour
1 tablespoon of desiccated coconut
1 egg
5 tablespoons of milk
½ teaspoon of baking powder
pinch of salt
oil for frying
caster sugar/yoghurt
fruit