Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & beyond

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It was probably not the safest option and I now use my granite mortar, but a couple of food tins should also do the job. After spending a year in Italy, Olia settled in London, pursuing a journalistic career after completing her Master’s degree. I add barberries to my holubtsi to achieve that sour note, but you don’t have to if they are hard to find. I live in France so I cannot talk about the rest of the world but most ingredients are pretty common and quite easy to find. My grandmother used to make a version without tomatoes and using whole sauerkraut leaves and pork belly.

A number of jobs followed before her interest in food as an amateur reached its apogee and she decided to retrain as a chef at Leith's School of Food and Wine. Mamushka is a celebration of the food and flavours of the "Wild East" - from the Black Sea to Baku and Armenia to Azerbaijan, with over 100 recipes for fresh, flavourful and unexpected dishes from across the region. I used a dill pickle in tiny dice and mixed that with the red onion, pepper, and salt to mellow the onion. grams of flour to 1 cup of water would make a dough that is way too dry, if it would come together at all.

My husband's family traces to Ukraine just a couple generations back so that's one of the reasons I got this cookbook for him --and I'm the one having fun with it so far. I love the superb and delicate combination of herbs, spices and a wonderful range of fresh and local ingredients used in the recipes of this book. This makes a stickier cake layer than the standard Russian medovik biscuit layer which tastes just as good but isn't probably going to present as well as the latter, due to it's stickiness. Mix everything together with your hands and pop in the oven for 30 minutes until the edges of the vegetables start to char. Don’t use any oil, and don’t preheat the casserole – this will ensure that the fat is rendered slowly.

Most recipes I tried, I will add to my repertoire, but my favourites were the “Cold Beetroot Soup”, the “Armenian Soup with Lamb and Prune Meatballs”, the “Grilled Vegetable Caviar”, the Georgian Kidney Bean Salad”, “Chilli and Garlic Cucumber”, and the “Azerbaijani Rice and Fruity Lamb”. Finally, I used the beef short ribs, but they were pretty fatty and wouldn't be my choice next time. I saw this recipe, realized I had all the ingredients, and thought, "that sounds good - the prunes are in interesting addition, let's try it. This is real cooking, written about with so much love' - Diana Henry'From stuffed cabbage leaves to garlicky poussins, Olia Hercules's recipes are redolent of long summers in her mother's Ukrainian garden; rich, nourishing and enhanced by her stint as an Ottolenghi chef' - Observer Food Monthly.Serve the poussins drizzled with the herby juices, or mop the juices up with bread, along with the tkhemali. Lightly beat the eggs in a bowl, then slowly sift in and mix in the flour – just enough to create a firm dough. Knead the dough until it becomes firm and elastic without sticking, then cover with clingfilm and let it rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes.