Sacramento food blogger Tatyana Nesteruk shines a light on Eastern Europe in cookbook
We’re all stuck at home and experimenting in the kitchen. Why not borscht?
Popular Eastern European food blogger and Sacramento resident Tatyana Nesteruk hopes you will give it a try, along with other traditional recipes from her new cookbook “Beyond Borscht: Old-World Recipes from Eastern Europe.”
A hearty beef and beet soup, borscht is topped with a dollop of sour cream and fresh dill. It is a flagship dish from the region where Nesteruk was born. Her family immigrated to Seattle when Nesteruk was a baby, but she was raised immersed in family dishes from the Ukraine, Russia, Poland and more.
“These are the foods that I grew up with,” Nesteruk said. “It was such a great book to write for me because it’s something I’ve wanted to write for a very long time. It’s a collection of all these really delicious dishes I grew up with.”
Nesteruk’s brand, Tatyana’s Every Day Food, includes a YouTube channel with 425,000 subscribers as well as a food blog and social media presence on Facebook and Instagram. She has built a following based on her visually striking cakes and desserts, as well as creative and easy recipes for home cooks with a sophisticated palate.
Nesteruk’s first cookbook, “The European Cake Cookbook,” showcases her talent for creating decadent and beautiful cakes, with a regional focus on different areas of Europe. But Nesteruk said her readers wanted more, including savory dishes.
“Beyond Borscht” has, “a really good mix of everything,” according to Nesteruk. The book has 75 recipes including appetizers, soups, salads, side dishes, main entrees, and a dessert chapter that includes drinks recipes, pastries, cookies “and a few cakes thrown in there too.”
The savory dishes are “the dishes I like to cook at home,” Nesteruk said. These include beef borscht, of course, and dishes like chicken Kiev, pelmeni with creamy dill sauce – an Eastern European take on ravioli – and chicken shashliki, or kabobs, as well as savory, crepe-like blini with chicken and mushrooms.
“All the crucial Eastern European recipes are in there,” Nesteruk said.
For dessert, Nesteruk made sure to feature her favorite Ukrainian sweets, including Napoleon torte, cherry vareniki, or sweet dumplings, deep-fried apple piroshki, and waffle rolls with caramel filling.
Nesteruk hopes her new cookbook will be eye-opening to readers who are unfamiliar with Eastern European cuisine and all it has to offer. Though regional Eastern European cuisine is not on as many peoples’ radar as, say, French or Italian, it is worth exploring, especially for home cooks in search of something comforting, according to Nesteruk.
“This cuisine is very hearty, it’s like a comfort food,” Nesteruk said. “It’s very unique and on its own very delicious, so I really want people to discover this cuisine and find out how good it is. I feel like it’s kind of hidden, not a lot of people know about it.”
Nesteruk made sure to streamline her recipes so that the ingredients can be found at any grocery store.
Check it out
Beyond Borscht: Old-World Recipes from Eastern Europe: Ukraine, Russia, Poland & More
By Tatyana Nesteruk can be purchased on Amazon, or at major book retailers starting March 31.
