When I put on the table my recently made cake, my family looked incredulous – green, maybe with cabbage or worse still with spinach. I calmed them down a bit with the information that one of the main ingredients is chocolate. Cake and chocolate – it sounds familiar, but this colour ... The secret of the colour and taste of the cake is matcha – a special kind of Japanese green tea. It differs from normal green tea in that it grows in the shade, which is what gives it its intense green colour. The leaves are harvested by hand, dried and triturated.

Matcha is a rich source of antioxidants, which could prevent the progression of cancer, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. Additionally, it rejuvenates, speeds up the metabolism, reduces stress, boosts immunity and lowers cholesterol.
Matcha is a versatile product. With it you can prepare not only tea, but you can also add it to cakes, cocktails, yoghurts and ice-creams.

The brownie which I prepared with matcha was my first but definitely not my last encounter with this remarkable tea. I'm not the author of the recipe for this cake. I found it in my recipe book, but unfortunately, there was no source.

Ingredients:
110g of butter
300g of white chocolate

What can we fry a fish in? In olive, butter, or maybe in lard, if somebody likes it. And now a surprise! That's not the whole story. Apparently, you can also fry fish ... in water. I learnt about this smart and very simple method in the culinary adventure "To Gdańsk for fish" by Karol Okrasa.

In this episode captain Jerzy Wąsowicz cooked with the presenter. He shared a Polynesian recipe for preparing fish. The Captain suggested frying a fish steak with the skin and spine to keep the fish in one piece. I have fried some salmon fillets with skin. They were great as well.

Ingredients:
4 salmon steaks (min. 2 cm thick)
4 tablespoons of butter
4 cloves of garlic
1 tablespoon of minced dill
salt and pepper

Today I would like to share with you another recipe with asparagus in the starring role. The preparation doesn't take very long and there are very few ingredients. Green asparagus is best for this dish. White ones can be used for preparing an exquisite soup. The combination of asparagus and Parma ham is a classic dish; it looks elegant and tastes excellent.

You may sprinkle this dish with grated Parmesan, but if you need a more sumptuous supper, poached or fried egg will be a great side dish. This meal is excellent with chilled dry white wine.

Ingredients:
a bank of asparagus
slices of Parma ham (as many as you have asparagus)
2 tablespoons of olive oil
grated Parmesan

For a lot of us, desserts must contain chocolate. I understand perfectly because I like it too. Sometimes, regardless of my love of chocolate, I would like something less sweet, more bracing. I think because of this, this year's counterbalance to the sweet caramel-chocolate Easter cake was a lemon tart. Decorated with colourful light flowers from an edible wafer, it looked very spring-like and was extremely tasty.

My proposal today is a combination of a lime's energizing sourness with the sweetness of two kinds of chocolate and the caramel crunchiness of candies with sesame seeds. Actually, it is difficult to resist the temptation to eat everything at once.

Ingredients:
150ml of 30% sweet cream
100g of white chocolate
2 tablespoons of lime juice
20g of dark chocolate
lime peel
sesame seed candy

At one time, Polish beef came from cows which had stopped yielding milk, and it could be used only for broth. Tourists who visited the USA or Argentina were talking about wonderful, tender, and juicy beef steak. Notwithstanding the quality of the meat, when I was a child, beef cutlets, roulades, and stew were cooked by my mum and were always served with buckwheat groats.

Now it is easier. The animals are bred specifically for meat. When we choose a good piece of meat, we can prepare a slick and tasty dish. For the beef cutlets I prepared you should choose beef tenderloin. It is quite expensive, so you could use loin or entrecote as well.

Ingredients:
0.5 kg beef tenderloin
1 onion
2 tablespoons of butter
1 chili pepper
2 gherkins
1 tablespoon of flour
2 tablespoons of mustard
2 allspices