In her debut cookbook Mamushka, Olia turned to her mother’s, aunt’s and grandmother’s culinary secrets to tell the story of Ukrainian cooking. Kaukasis, her second instalment, documents her journey across Georgia and Azerbaijan in a celebration of the food and flavours of the Caucasus region. For her latest book, Summer Kitchens, Olia returns to rural Ukraine to call on childhood memories spent idly around the outhouse kitchens her family and friends would cook in – and the dishes that would come out of them. “They are not exactly glamorous, but they do have a certain romantic feel to them.” Olia is not wrong. When she begins to speak of the past and the magic of the outhouse kitchens, you can almost smell the aromas that would fill the Ukrainian summer air. If Eastern European cuisine was not on your radar before, spending five minutes with Olia is enough to have you convinced that it should be…

Summer kitchens exist all over rural Ukraine, they are one-room houses situated a few steps away from the main house, close to where people’s vegetables and fruit trees grow. Everyone cooks their everyday meals there in the summer as Ukraine gets very hot, so it is a much cooler space to prep food in. They are not exactly glamorous, but they do have a certain romantic feel to them. The way we eat in Ukraine is very seasonal, so all of your summer vegetable and fruit glut gets preserved in 3-litre jars and stored in the summer kitchens for the colder months.

Picture a small stove with a very large pot on top of it. Inside you will find a lively sweet lava with greenish-pink berries bobbing up and down – it is gooseberry jam in the making. We used to be given the sweet foam (some call it scum, but really it’s just air bubbles trapped in sugary fruit pulp) as a treat when we were children. Then there is another pot – the liquid in it looks clear, some allspice berries, a whole head of garlic, a few bay leaves and dill umbrellas are slowly floating and infusing the liquid with their savoury-sweet flavours. This is a big batch of brine, heated gently to absorb the flavour. It will be poured into many jars filled with whole tomatoes, cucumbers, chillies, and even aubergines – produce that will become sour through the process of fermentation.

Unrefined sunflower oil – it tastes like squeezed toasted sunflower seeds. Good-quality vinegar, dried fig and mandarin vinegar from Vinegar Shed are my favourites at the moment. Maldon salt, of course.

I love the beetroot leaf ‘holubtsi’ rolls. People throw beetroot leaves away often, which is such a shame as they taste delicious, very similar to chard. You steam the leaves briefly if they are sprightly, leave as is if they are wilted. Then make a caramelised onion, carrot, mushroom and buckwheat filling and fold this filling into the leaves, like a burrito. Then whip up a tasty garlicky tomato sauce enriched with a little bit of creme fraiche and cook the beetroot rolls in it. They turn out light but are also extremely comforting.

It was to do with my new-found obsession with all things food when I was in my mid-twenties, combined with a financial crisis. I survived a few rounds of redundancies in 2009, but I had a feeling my future as a junior reporter was at stake, so a complete overhaul felt timely and natural. My parents always dreamt that I’d become a business woman, so I was shocked when they were so supportive of this crazy new idea to become a chef.

Do it only if your gut tells you it is the thing you want to do no matter what. It may be a humble living with not much financial return for a while, and it’ll take hard graft to get you where you want to be. But if waking up to the idea of prepping vegetables all day or working with dough charges you with positivity and makes you feel elated – then why not? Give your all.

Food has always been intrinsic to my identity. We have a large extended family, and we’d often gather and sit under an old tree in my grandmother’s garden, just by the summer kitchen. The adults would cook and then we would all eat and stories would be shared, some funny and some sad. I learned of my family’s history this way… Some episodes were so vivid due to everyone’s expert storytelling skills, they almost feel like actual memories to me now. That’s what I want to bring to my cooking.

I was in heaven because I absolutely adored seafood. We had lots of delicious crayfish in the summer in Ukraine, but the prawns, octopus, mussels that we ate in Cyprus – that was all new and exciting. It wasn’t immediately apparent what the influence was, but now I can draw so many parallels between Cypriot and Ukrainian cooking – the quality of ingredients, strong but pure flavours. Vegetables tasting like how they should in the most wonderful way, fish seasoned by the sea and a spritz of lemon, all the pastries with spinach and salty cheese reminded me of my south Ukrainian heritage which is actually very Mediterranean in its essence.

A lot of fresh vegetables, think young cabbage and prickly cucumber salad sharpened by a little vinegar. Huge tomatoes, sliced and resembling big slabs of steak, dressed with nutty unrefined sunflower oil and some salt. Perhaps some grilled meat, marinated pork neck dosed in finely ground pepper with thickly sliced onions steeped in vinegar. Fermented pickles (cucumbers, chunks of cabbage made pink by the addition of beetroot wedges, whole tomatoes, even aubergines) stuffed with mint and grated carrot. For pudding? Feather-light steamed buns filled with seasonal berries tossed in brown butter and sugared toasted nuts.

I have been listening to Marion Black and Jonathan Richman’s songs on repeat. Also there are my playlist regulars like the Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha, the genius Mariana Sadovska, as well as Nick Cave and Dirty Three.

My four grandparents – there is so much I didn’t ask them.

Towpath, 40 Maltby Street, The Laughing Heart and Bright -– they all serve food with a similar soul. Fantastic ingredients grown, produced and cooked by people who care.

Japan, without a doubt.

Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala and I am almost finished with the brilliant Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Ukrainian-Canadian writer and opera singer, Maria Reva.

There is a very simple recipe where you cook aubergine like you would for baba ganoush, until it becomes charred and collapses into itself. You whisk a knob of butter into the soft, creamy aubergine flesh and season it. Then take a piece of toasted sourdough and rub it with half a piece of garlic and half of a very ripe tomato. Top this with the buttery aubergine and perhaps some fresh herbs to season. It is so simple, fresh, healthy and comforting – everything a good meal should be.