My Ukrainian Babushka’s Kitchen is more than a cookbook. It is a collection of family memories, Ukrainian traditions, and recipes that take me back to my childhood and to my grandmother Sasha’s kitchen in Luhansk, Ukraine.

Inside you’ll find 12 traditional family recipes — from borscht, varenyky and holubtsi to syrnyky, medovyk and Christmas kutia. But every recipe begins with a story: the dough my Babushka said could “hear” us, the first hot derun I stole from the pan, summer afternoons spent pitting cherries together, jars of apricots saved for winter, my godfather’s honey, Christmas caroling, and the kutia we carried from home to home.

Babushka Sasha lived through incredibly difficult times, yet she taught our family to find warmth and joy in ordinary things. Food was one of the ways she did that.

I created this little book to preserve those memories and a piece of the Ukrainian home I grew up in.

Today, as a Ukrainian, I am rebuilding my life and trying to create an independent income through my own work. When you purchase this book, you are not only buying a collection of recipes — you are supporting a Ukrainian creator and helping one family’s stories live a little longer.

I hope you cook something from these pages.

But even more, I hope they make you think of the person whose food still tastes like home to you. ❤️