A Ukrainian-inspired salad to make you fall in love with buckwheat

New recipe + new email format!

Hello friends, and welcome to a new email format, the Wednesday Dispatch (name tbd), that I’m experimenting with. This is set to be a quick weekly check-in featuring a newly-published recipe, plus a random rec for a thing I’m currently loving (similar to the recs in the monthly Gazette). Let’s jump in!

Ukrainian-Inspired Buckwheat Salad with Pickles

As a full-blooded Ukrainian, buckwheat has always been a constant of my diet. Well, to be specific, my mom was really keen on us eating the stuff because it’s the superfood of Eastern European superfoods. Plus, it was cheap, accessible, and shelf-stable – i.e. the holy trinity of Soviet cooking.

But it wasn’t until I became an adult that I was able to appreciate its nutty personality and robust nutritional profile.

The most common way to serve buckwheat is as a side dish – plain, boiled, with butter. But recently, my friend Sofya – a fellow Ukrainian – sent me a photo of her dinner. “I made a Ukrainian ‘bowl’ for dinner, I think you would love it,” the text read.

The buckwheat salad in the photo had chickpeas, carrots, and so much dill that the “bowl” was mostly green. I immediately fell in love with the concept and knew I’d have to recreate it. After making a couple of tweaks to my own preferences, I now have a new favorite grain salad.

As most of you know, I’m in a pretty fragile state at the moment, so when I was looking for a new show to get into, I needed something… specific. No violence, no raunchy sex, no extreme wealth, and nothing extreme in general. That’s where I came across Somebody Somewhere.

True to its name, it’s about regular people doing regular things in the Midwest, going through the ups and downs of regular life. Created by and starring comedian Bridget Everett, along with the extremely lovable Jeff Hiller, this comedy/drama is easy to watch but not shallow.

This Substack is the newsletter companion to my site, thenewbaguette.com. You can find all my recipes published there in full, with helpful tips and step-by-step photos. You can also follow along on Instagram, where I share videos and behind-the-scenes content.