Ukrainian chef and food blogger Anna Voloshyna first made her mark on the Bay Area culinary scene in 2017 as a host of lively, Slavic pop-up dinners that introduced guests to the wonders of butter-laden khachapuri, green sorrel borscht and garlic pampushky.
Voloshyna, who moved to the Bay Area in 2011 after living in Kyiv for 20 years, was homesick and eager to share the flavors of her Eastern European upbringing in America. When she saw the way diners consumed her mom’s famous pickled tomatoes, drinking the liquid after the tomatoes had been wiped out, she knew she’d touched a foodie nerve.
A lot has changed since then. Voloshyna, who lives in San Francisco, still hosts dinners. But she is also a culinary instructor, teaching everything from dumpling making to vodka infusion. She has penned and photographed a debut cookbook, “Budmo! Recipes from a Ukrainian Kitchen.” And it is six months into an unjust war that forced Voloshyna’s entire family to hide in their root cellar before escaping to Odessa, where they remain safe.
“When I started writing this book, there was no war,” says Voloshyna, who grew up in southern Ukraine surrounded by dairy and wheat farms and open-air produce markets. “We fought hard for those 31 years of independence and started to own our cuisine. And here we are, fighting again. We’re fighting to speak Ukrainian. We’re fighting to be able to say that borscht is a Ukrainian dish. By owning our cuisine and honoring the traditions, we can own our history.”
“Budmo!” (Rizzoli, $40), which debuts Sept. 27, features traditional Slavic home cooking with modern touches. Voloshyna’s stuffed cabbage rolls are vegetarian, for instance, and get their complexity from pickled cabbage leaves and cream sauce, rather than the standard tomato. Her cold pink borscht, a dish eaten during Ukraine’s hot summers, is topped with crisp radishes, cucumbers and herbs for added color and texture.
And instead of red beets and raw onions, she makes Slavic vinegret salad with golden beets — she hates peeling red ones — and pickled red onions for zing.
“I really wanted to do these dishes my way and celebrate the produce we have here,” she says. “When you cook back home, it’s much simpler. You don’t use a lot of garnishes or finish a dish with olive oil. These things give the food a modernized feel.”
Voloshyna opens “Budmo!” with an essential and eye-opening look at the ways in which centuries of political upheaval and occupation, particularly during the reign of the USSR, have shaped and even erased regional culinary traditions across the region, from Bulgaria to Estonia and Slovenia to Ukraine, which is known as the breadbasket of Europe.
She celebrates those countries with recipes for stuffed eggplant rolls and the famously rich Adjarian flatbread, khachapuri, both from Georgia, alongside Crimean beef stew with chickpeas, Hungarian lángos with salmon roe and Armenian baked halibut wrapped in lavash.
She also shares pantry must-haves, from sunflower oil and sour cream to dill, buckwheat, pork belly and pickles, and offers a comprehensive chapter on the vast array of Slavic breads, crepes and dumplings. (Hint: Add vodka to chebureki dough. It makes the savory turnovers fry up light and bubbly).
Mostly, though, the cookbook is a celebration — budmo is a Ukrainian toast, after all — of the bountiful seasons, hearty dishes and family feasts central to Ukrainian life. Home cook favorites reign, from meat-and-rice stuffed peppers to holiday specialties, like Easter pork shank or roast duck.
“It’s pretty simple, comforting food made to get your family together, celebrate life and the land, seasonality and preservation,” she says.
With at least five months of the year too cold to cultivate crops or even a household vegetable garden in Ukraine, preservation and pickling was key to enjoying fruits and vegetables, she says. As such, those chapters are among the most exciting, featuring recipes for syr, a soft, tangy cheese similar to French fromage blanc, beet-pickled cabbage and horseradish-infused vodka.
As the war rages on, Voloshyna continues to raise money for Ukraine — $70,000 to date — with cooking classes and other events. In addition to the safety of loved ones and fellow Ukrainians, she is extremely concerned about the food terrorism she says is being committed by Russian forces.
“Half of the country’s wheat is currently under Russian occupation,” she says. “Whatever they cannot steal, they just destroy. Entire harvests gone. It is another level of evil.”
Meet Anna
Sept. 10: Taste an array of bites, sip infused vodkas and enjoy live Ukrainian music while raising money for World Central Kitchen. Tickets for the event, which runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Oshman Family JCC, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto, are $45. Visit www.eventbrite.com and search “Budmo!” for details.
Sept. 25: Learn to make Ukrainian appetizers and Georgian cheese flatbread during this in-person class ($170), with 20 percent of the proceeds going to World Central Kitchen. The class runs from 3 to 7 p.m. at The Civic Kitchen, 2961 Mission St., San Francisco. Visit https://civickitchensf.com and click on classes for details.
Oct 5: This Milk Street virtual cooking class ($30) on empanada-like chebureki and green ajika, a spicy Georgian sauce, runs from 3 to 4:15 p.m. Visit www.eventbrite.com and search “Ukrainian Home Cooking.”
Oct 7: This in-person cooking demo ($75) of four dishes from “Budmo!”, including Bell Peppers Stuffed with Meat and Rice, Buckwheat Kasha with Mushrooms and Mom’s Spicy and Sour Tomatoes, starts at 6 p.m. at Draeger’s Cooking School, 222 E. Fourth Ave. in San Mateo. Find details at www.draegerscookingschool.com.
Oct 8: Stop by the Foodwise classroom tent in front of the San Francisco Ferry Building for a cooking demo at 10:30 a.m., followed by a book signing at Book Passage inside the Ferry Building Marketplace. https://cuesa.org/
Source: www.mercurynews.com