🟡 Preview — not yet kitchen-tested. 12 recipes, all written but not yet cooked by a tester. Tap any recipe button below to open it. Revised 15 October 2026.
🇺🇦 Come to the table. Discover Ukrainian food traditions through free Kitchen Monk™ adaptations, created in a spirit of nourishment, hospitality, peace and solidarity.
🆓 Free to read, print and cook. No account, email, purchase or donation needed.
🌻 Ukrainian food is wonderfully diverse, shaped by region, season, faith and family. This is a growing collection of Kitchen Monk adaptations. It celebrates those traditions without claiming to represent every household or region, and Ukrainian cooks remain the authorities on their own food.
🌱 How we cook
Our recipes are whole-food and plant-based, with no added salt, oil or refined sugar (“SOS-free”). Ingredients still contain their own natural sodium and sugars, so fruit-sweetened dishes are “no sugar added,” never “sugar-free.” Each recipe explains what we changed from the traditional dish and why. When a change alters a dish’s character, we say “inspired by.”
⭐ New here? Start with these
Four of the simplest dishes to begin with: one pot or one pan each, no shaping or rolling.
🎬 Watch and learn the techniques
Eight videos from Ukrainian and plant-based cooks, playing one after another: cooking buckwheat, rolling holubtsi, pinching varenyky and more. They are technique demonstrations with different ingredients, so follow our recipes for amounts. Tap Play once for sound.
🍽️ Browse the table
🥣 Soups
Borshch with white beans · Борщ: deep-red beet soup with cabbage, potatoes and beans.
🥟 Dumplings
Potato and mushroom varenyky · Вареники: half-moon dumplings with a whole-wheat dough. A weekend project.
🥬 Cabbage and vegetables
Holubtsi with lentils and brown rice · Голубці: cabbage rolls baked in tomato sauce.
Beet, apple and walnut salad · Буряковий салат: a bright Kitchen Monk variation.
🥔 Potatoes
Oven-baked deruny · Деруни: grated-potato pancakes baked instead of fried.
🌾 Grains and porridges
Mushroom buckwheat kasha · Гречана каша з грибами: toasted buckwheat with mushrooms and beans.
Banosh-inspired creamy cornmeal: inspired by the Hutsul cornmeal dish of the Carpathians.
Pumpkin and millet porridge · Гарбузова каша з пшоном: a golden autumn porridge.
🎄 Fruit and celebration foods
Date-sweetened kutia · Кутя: wheat berries, poppy seed and walnuts, from the Christmas Eve table and welcome any time of year.
🫖 Drinks
Uzvar · Узвар: dried apples, pears and prunes, simmered and steeped, with no sweetener added.
🥄 Sauces and accompaniments
Creamy mushroom gravy and tangy dill cream: Kitchen Monk originals to spoon over deruny, varenyky, kasha and borshch.
🌱 A growing table
More dishes are being researched, including green borshch, kapusniak, pampushky, nalysnyky, syrnyky, hrechanyky, paska and makivnyk. Breads, dumplings and cakes will be shared only after their doughs and batters have been tested. Crimean Tatar dishes will be named and credited as Crimean Tatar food traditions. This collection is the first chapter of The Global Flourishing Table™, a Kitchen Monk project now in development.
🙏 Credit and sources
📚 Cultural background for these pages comes from Ukraine.ua’s guide to Ukrainian food; “Celebrating the Ukrainian way: The 12 dishes of Christmas” by Mia Billetdeaux, The Kyiv Independent (2023); “A recipe for traditional banosh,” NV (2023); and UNESCO’s 2022 inscription of the culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking. These sources provide cultural context only; they did not create, test or endorse these Kitchen Monk recipes.
🎥 Video creators are credited by name on each recipe page, and their videos are linked or embedded from YouTube. None of them has reviewed or endorsed these adaptations. No outside photographs or recipe text have been copied.
✉️ Corrections, family variations and Ukrainian-language suggestions are warmly welcome: rfjeep@gmail.com
These are general recipes for home cooking, not individual medical or nutrition advice. Check every label for allergens, salt and added sugar or oil.
