Kachka: A Return to Russian Cooking Hardcover – November 14, 2017

This is a fabulous book! It’s filled with surprisingly healthy and rich comfort food. Her instructions are really clear and it’s pretty easy to get everything to come out right the first time. Lots of dishes are the sort where they bubble away for a few hours making the whole house smell heavenly. She includes so many personal memories and stories along the way, adding to the charm of the book.My only disappointment is that the legendary Stroganoff from her restaurant isn’t in the book. <sniff>My thoughts and pics of the dishes we tried:1-2) Chicken Kiev – p 297. This is delicious. I found it tricky to get it pounded thin enough to really encase the butter and dill without tearing, but practice will certainly be yummy!3-5) Short Rib Borsch – p 221. This is amazing. Amazing! It’s the healthiest full-on comfort food ever.6) Golubtsi (cabbage rolls) – p 289. These are wonderfully fragrant and yummy. Cabbage stuffed in beef, pork, lamb, and rice in a rich tomato sauce with a touch of sweetness from carrots and balancing tart notes from lingonberries. My daughter had three they were so delicious!7-8) Armenian Pumpkin Dolmas – p 302. Our store had acorn squash so I went with those. I just had to wrap it in aluminum foil so the rice could finish steaming since they were over-stuffed. Fabulous dinner. The spiced dried fruits and apples with rice and a little lamb were lovely with the squash. And they’re awfully cute.I’ll update this as I play in the book more!Some others I have flagged to try: Too many cocktails and other drinks to name – pages 21-65 * Mushrooms Julienne – p 161 * Cabbage Pirog – p 165 * Khachapuri Imertian (cheese and cilantro pie) – p 167 * Chicken Blinchiki (blintzes)– p 177 * Dumpling Dough – p 195 * Siberian Pelmeni (meat dumplings) – p 198 * Sour Cherry Vareniki (fruit dumplings) – p 204 * Cholodnik (creamy beet soup) – p 217 * Okroshka (meat and vegetables with a kefir based dressing) – p 219 * Lyulya Kebab (spiced lamb) – p 242 * Armenian Pumpkin Dolmas – p 302 * Three-Layer Condensed Milk Cake – p 323

Since I have bought this cookbook I have made many recipes from it. The book is written with considerate clarity and the recipes though simple always yield deliciously comforting results. My favorites from Kachka are the pelmeni recipes. If you are like me, the idea of making your own dough for dumplings sounds awfully overwhelming. However, Morales promises so convincingly that a homemade dough is far better than anything you can find at the store and her instructions on how to roll out your own dough are straightforward and foolproof.The ingredients lists are often short and simple. At times the recipes may recommend a trip to a Russian grocery store to find items, although clear instruction is usually given on how to select more obscure products or find substitutions.There are many more recipes I can't wait to try. I've sampled a little of every chapter and can say that from appetizers to the sweets, everything was easy to understand and could be whipped up without too much stress even in my small apartment kitchen. The recipes feel like the kind that I will turn to again and again for any occasion whether you are entertaining, or looking to stockpile your freezer with homemade goods which can be made in an instant later. I highly recommend Kachka to cooks of all skill levels wanting to explore Russian cooking!I was not paid for this review and have no affiliation with the author. I love cookbooks and review and write about them. Check out my instagram @theReadingCook for more photos and information about my experiences with Kachka.

We're lucky enough to have eaten at Kachka many times and this cookbook gives you the recipes to recreate Kachka at home! I've cooked about 10 things from it so far, they've all turned out beautifully. I'm thrilled I can now make the pelmeni at home! (Yes, I bought a pelmenitsa!) This is not labor free food, the recipes are intensive and for a lot of them you need to start the day before, but they're worth it. I consider myself an above average cook and this isn't a beginner's cookbook, but if you can follow a Julia Child recipe, you should do fine with Kachka.

This is a terrific honest, accurate, insightful, profound with a chuckle, inspiring, enlightening cook book about my old-country cuisine. I also have eaten at the restaurant in Portland OR. Everything they’re in the menu is delicious. I have made some drinks at home I never knew how to make!!!! — Outstanding! Spa-see-bah!

Such a fun cookbook! From colors to layout to the recipes! And there’s LOTS of recipes in this book. These are NOT necessarily authentically Russian (but many are) but a great collection of Soviet Era cooking. Lots of foods that I grew up eating in Ukraine. From herring under fur coat, to pelmeni, salat olivye, mouth watering looking kulebyaka, to yeasty dough marvels—this book will make you drool. There are also lots of delicious and unique vodka infusion combinations, like dill flower, chamomile, horse radish (!) and cocktails, if you’re into that. I stayed up until 3am reading this book the day I got it! Highly recommend!

The recipes are a little bit more difficult if unfamiliar with what things like "season to taste" mean. I'm unfamiliar with Russian or European cooking so getting these flavors right without any reference is difficult without guidance. I want to know what Morales' version of "season to taste" means before I try to alter it. That being said, I bought this book specifically for her oreshki recipe hoping the recipe will yield similar cookies to the ones found at Kachka.