It started with a simple salad: Natasha Kravchuk began building a cooking mini-empire by combining cucumber, tomato and avocado. When a television anchor shared the recipe on Facebook in 2015, the dish went viral.
“I think that was the recipe that kind of gave us the first lift,” says Kravchuk, whose online hub Natasha’s Kitchen has grown to some 13 million followers across social media. “I think that’s trademark for what you can find on Natasha’s Kitchen.”
Kravchuk’s philosophy is indeed mixed into that salad – flavourful food that does not take a long time, uses regular ingredients and does not hurt the pocketbook.
“It’s turning humble and just simple ingredients into something really delicious,” she says. “That just has always carried through with me. I don’t think you need saffron to make something taste incredible, you know?”
This autumn, Kravchuk has put her expertise into her debut cookbook, Natasha’s Kitchen: 100+ Easy Family-Favorite Recipes You’ll Make Again and Again, which includes dishes such as salmon piccata and turkey meatball soup, and crispy bacon jalapeño poppers.
“It’s approachable. You can look at the list of ingredients and be like, ‘OK, I have most of those things already’. The steps are simple and they are recipes that work,” she says.
The book is classic, chicken-soup cooking – and, indeed, there is a recipe for that on page 115. There is even a dish – zuppa Toscana – inspired by an offering at US restaurant chain Olive Garden. “I make it better,” she says, laughing.
“We cook a little bit of everything now, but I think people trust our taste in food and they can relate to the values that we have,” she says.
Ukrainian-born Kravchuk and her family fled religious persecution in the 1980s and eventually found their way to Meridian in the US state of Idaho.
She did not start cooking until later in life and started blogging in 2009. “When I got married, I wanted to recreate the same foods we grew up loving and enjoy. So I started learning how to cook. I started going to the library, getting stacks of books, asking my mom, my mother-in-law for recipes, and friends.”
“It was easy to imagine her as your next-door neighbour or maybe a fellow parent at a bake sale at your kid’s school,” Roxborough says.
Roxborough and her daughter made Kravchuk’s pierogi together – a fun time bonding, as well as delicious – and she says she has become obsessed with the recipe for tres leches (“three milks” in Spanish) cupcakes. “It’s dangerously good,” she says.
The cookbook, which last week debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’ Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list, contains a dozen or so reader favourites, but most of the recipes are new, split into breakfast, snacks, salads, soups, mains, sides and desserts. A battalion of over 300 testers have kicked the tyres on each dish.
The book includes Kravchuk’s mother’s Ukrainian pancakes, which call for yeasted batter. She says they puff up like doughnuts when they hit the hot oil and have a subtle, sourdough-like flavour.
“They just need a little bit of time to pop up. But the beauty of those is you can make them and enjoy them for several days, whereas the typical pancakes with baking soda or baking powder, they’re really only good the first day,” she says.
Kravchuk spotted two items to put together during warm weather – bacon and corn – and came up with a dish that will cause every parent to slap their forehead because they did not already do it by now. One of her nieces named it “Ba-Corn” and that simply cannot be improved upon.
Kravchuk did not follow the food world’s traditional route for a rising chef.
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October 22, 2023 at 03:15PM
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Ukrainian-born Natasha’s Kitchen food blogger on her ‘simple’ recipes - South China Morning Post
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