Welcome to Breadnik!
My name is Nika, and my mission is to share with you the goodness of homemade breads and my passion for celebrating the changing seasons with food.
Having grown up in the Soviet Union I’d been raised on local and seasonal food — even if for no other reason than that nothing else was available. If you wanted to savor the memories of summer during the cold dark nights of our 7-months long winter, you had to work hard and preserve your food when it was in season.
This is why to this day I always make sure there’s an abundance of beautiful summer fruits — strawberries, peaches, pears, tomatoes, to name a few — preserved and stored in my pantry, waiting to be turned into miraculous winter meals that strengthen the body and encourage the spirit to believe that the spring WILL come, no matter how little we can believe it while freezing here in northeast Ohio in the middle of January!
And even though our climate here is much, much gentler than in frigid Moscow, I still believe it is good for the body and the soul to naturally go through the seasonal changes and to enjoy and celebrate each season as it comes. This is why I choose to express my passion for food and healthy living and my wish for a more harmonious planet through my food – sourced as locally and seasonally as possible and cooked with love, knowledge, imagination and care.
In my kitchen I focus on two kinds of food that have been with humankind for almost our entire history: soups and bread. One of our most ancient foods, a staple for millennia, bread provides vital nourishment, healing our bodies and comforting our souls. Oh, the goodness of fresh crunchy crust and the softness of the sweet, delicious crumb! The aroma of baking bread is what turns my house into a cozy home, making me think of all my ancestors for whom their daily bread was, most likely, the best part of the day!
Until just a few years ago I thought that I, of all the people, could NEVER bake anything. But a couple of years ago I came across this wonderful fail-safe recipe, and I was hooked. Naturally, I quickly moved onto more “serious” artisan breads but I still occasionally bake this No-Knead Bread, and, let me assure you, not just for sentimental reasons! Since then, striving to perfect my art I have baked thousands of loaves, baguettes, buns, ciabattas, bread sticks, brioches, challahs and flatbreads. I love to learn and to try out new things, so I might bake Italian, Armenian, Jewish, Lebanese, French, Indian, German, Russian or any other kind of bread I feel inspired to make on a given day.
The soups — which are usually paired with my bread of the day — are the quintessence of a culture. Nothing else will allow you the glimpse into the history, geography, agriculture, traditions and flavors of a nation like a simple humble soup. Having traveled extensively around the former Soviet Union and Central/Western Europe, and having studied the culture and history of many nations, I incorporate their traditions into the food I cook to honor our past, connect us to the future and provide for a better TODAY for all of us.
Please check out my SoupScription and Ingredients pages to see what I have to offer.