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. Mix everything together with your hands and pop in the oven for 30 minutes until the edges of the vegetables start to char. After having her son, and filming for The Food Network, Olia has been writing for Sainsbury's, The Recipe Kit, and the Guardian.

I read some comments saying that the food was bland, having only tried two recipes, I cannot talk about the others but they were far from bland, especially the chicken as it contains spices, citrus and walnuts.Cook the poussins, cut side down, over a medium heat for 3 minutes, then flip them over and cook them skin side down for 5 minutes. It is a beautiful book to begin with; there is at least one picture to accompany each recipe plus pictures of Olia Hercules and her family in Ukraine. This dish is something our whole extended family adopted: silky noodles, pulled goose and its juices. I really shouldn’t have been surprised, as the Soviet Union was much bigger than Western Europe, and France (or Italy) alone have so many traditional foods specific to tiny regions.

Olia Hercules was born in Ukraine and lived in Cyprus for 5 years before moving to London to study a BA in Italian language, followed by an MA in Russian and English. 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. I halved the recipe and made it two times in the week to serve with the Sorrel Broth (duck soup) recipe in the book. It does not have a step suggesting you pull out the chicken parts, de-bone and shred, despite the accompanying picture showing just that.Once the goose is ready, cook the noodles in a large saucepan of salted boiling water for 2 minutes. 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'd also suggest to youtube the name of the biscuit to learn about the shaping as the explanation is very vague. It is published on August 10th in the UK and Australia and in October 2017 in the US, Canada, Germany and Poland.

My parents were survivors of the Holocaust from Poland--this wasn't exactly something I grew up with. I suspected without weights for the ingredients especially the salt and water that this recipe would fail.Olia Hercules will entice you with evocative new flavours and ingredient combinations that will leave you asking yourself why you haven't been eating Ukrainian food all your life! Made this soup and the suggested Moldovan flatbread (made them twice--once for first meal and then, for leftover soup). The recipes are a solid combination of bright and fresh, as well as home-y and warm, with a good variety of complexities levels as well.