Home Food: Recipes from the founder of #CookForUkraine

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Acclaimed Ukrainian chef and food writer Olia Hercules shares 100 comforting recipes that can unite us no matter where we are from and where we end up. In addition to writing three critically acclaimed cookbooks, Hercules is also credited with the launch of the #CookForUkraine movement. In this deeply personal cookbook, she pulls inspiration from her childhood in Ukraine, as well her years spent in Cyprus, Italy, and England.” It was not, as Ms Timoshkina told ITV News, a coincidence they show to fundraise through food as they felt it is a way of helping people understand the conflict on a very human level. The first word that springs to my head is wiiiiine! I really miss Ukrainian wine: natural, low-intervention wine of a kind that is very fashionable now. It would be a dream if I could drink that all summer. Olia lives in London with her sons Sasha and Wilf, and husband – fellow food writer and photographer Joe Woodhouse, writing, cooking and feeding her unceasing curiosity by researching food culture and culinary traditions of countries less explored.

Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect: Ukraine Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect: Ukraine

Recent events have rejigged so many family dynamics. My brother Sasha ended up moving to Kyiv from Lviv, and living in the same flat as his older son, Nikita, and his fiancee, Yana. Nikita is a very good meat cook, often roasting big slabs of this or that. My brother, however, who also loves cooking, really missed vegetables, so he started making this salad, which is hearty, because of the cooked aubergines and cheese, and fresh, because of the tomatoes. It’s the simplest thing with a short ingredients list, but it’s full of flavour and hits all your vegetable needs. Sasha calls it his Armenian salad but, to me, it is my brother’s. Following the financial crisis of 2008, Olia decided to quit her job as a film business reporter to pursue her dream to cook for a living.In the morning, take the poolish out of the fridge: it should look bubbly and slightly raised (if it doesn’t, I am sad to confirm that your yeast is dead). Whisk in the pumpkin puree, orange zest, eggs, one and a half teaspoons of salt and the sugar. Now add the flour: just dump it all in and stir with a fork or spoon. Knead the dough well, then leave somewhere warm for an hour or two, to rise.

Olia Hercules About – Olia Hercules

I tried the Cypriot salad, the tomato rice and potatoes of my childhood. There are so many others I want to try too. Olia also runs an online cookery school and community through the Patreon subscription platform and posts videos of Ukrainian cooking and beyond on YouTube. Olia’s latest two cookbooks with Bloomsbury are Summer Kitchens, a book that explores Ukrainian regional cooking and Home Food, an ode to cooking for her family.Divide the dough into four equal pieces and knead each one into a ball on a well-floured surface. Roll each ball into a long sausage, then put it on a barely floured surface and roll from the centre to the edges, stretching it out to 45cm or so. Put the dough sausages parallel to each other, perpendicular to you. Squish and stretch the top ends with your fingers, so they become a little thinner, then pinch together. Now, working from right to left, take the sausage on the right, feed it over its neighbour to the left, under the next sausage, and then over the final sausage. Again starting with the sausage on the right, feed it over, under and over again, and keep going until you have plaited the full lengths of the four dough sausages, then pinch together the bottom ends. The middle will look a bit bulkier, so stretch the whole thing delicately to even it up. Add the potatoes whole and cook for 10 minutes, or until they are soft, then add the sorrel, nettles and wild garlic and take off the heat. Taste the soup and add more salt if needed. In her most personal book yet, Olia Hercules distils a lifetime of kitchen curiosity into her 100 most-loved recipes. She draws on her broad influences: her childhood in Ukraine; her years in Cyprus and Italy; and her simple, veg-centric family meals at home in London. Cut the tomatoes into chunks over a serving bowl, to catch the juices, then mix with the aubergines, remaining olive oil, the sesame oil, the onions and their juices, herbs and feta, and serve. Potatoes of my childhood

Recipes – Olia Hercules

Put the butter and 150g caster sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment and whisk until fairly fluffy. Break the egg yolks with a fork and gradually add them to the mix, whisking them in well as you go, then whisk in the vanilla extract and cheese. Transfer the mixture to another bowl, then fold in the semolina or polenta (if you use the latter, you’ll will get a cake with more texture). But I know exactly what they will taste when they open that jar. So to me that was just like even talking about it now just gives me goosebumps and like, it's just so powerful." Olia Hercules’s fourth cookbook, Home Food: 100 Recipes to Comfort and Connect, is personal. Her mom’s crisp yet tender potatoes. Her husband’s beets and feta. Her friend’s family’s octopus with garlic. And this wintery, tangy salad—which could go with any of the above. For sure Towpath on the canal in London, also 40 Maltby Street and Rochelle Canteen. You get the gist: restaurants that use really good ingredients and you can feel the skill in cooking, but it’s not fussy.Style Department Represents Olia Hercules, Food Stylist". Style Department . Retrieved 15 December 2016. We really hope that by using food as our means of raising funds and raising awareness, we are giving people a chance to bring that conflict closer in a way that they can relate to, not just in an abstract, news headlines kind of way, but actually in a very tangible, very intimate way through food. I know my mum is protecting me: she doesn’t want me to see her cry’: Olia Hercules’ mother, Olga. Photograph: Kris Kirkham/Mitchell Beazley When I was giving birth to my son, Sasha, my first child, the midwives were like, “Are you OK?” And I was like, “I’m a chef! I’ve done 18-hour shifts at Ottolenghi, I can do this!” And I did. It was a really fast, efficient birth. Working in a busy restaurant kitchen definitely gives you insane stamina, for sure. You learn and your body learns it as well. Working with really soft, leavened dough is my favourite thing. I find the whole process extremely therapeutic and rewarding, and I love the smell.

Olia Hercules’ comfort food Dips, kebabs and crisp spuds: Olia Hercules’ comfort food

Hercules began working as a film journalist but amidst the 2008 economic crisis decided to change careers. Olia Hercules began working as a chef after completing a course at Leith's School of Food and Wine in 2010. [5] [6] She was then a food stylist for various publications, [7] after which she went on to work at London restaurant Ottolenghi's as a chef-de-partie (line cook). [8] [9]Leave the cake in its tin to rest and cool down, then slice and serve. Unsweetened tea with lemon goes perfectly with this. Put the radishes and onion slices in the bowl and mix with the dressing. Leave to macerate for 15 minutes. Add the herbs, scatter with the reserved pomegranate seeds and sprinkle with sumac if using. My death-row, apocalypse dish would be my mum’s Ukrainian dumplings called varenyky, which are filled with her homemade cheese that we call syr. It just wires some really crazy things in my brain and makes me release all of the endorphins.