Nalysnyky – Ukrainian crepes filled with cheese and dill

Nalysnyky or Налисники [nah-less-neh-keh] are absolutely my favourite Ukrainian dish. My mom calls them “nallies.”  You can’t make it in the Instant Pot. So, this is the first non-pressure cooker recipe.

It’s worth the effort.  These delicate crepes are filled with cheese and dill, smothered in cream and baked in the oven.

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Instant Pot Ukrainian Potato Soup

This is a recipe for a simple and easy potato soup.  How is this potato soup more Ukrainian than regular potato soup? This comes from some variations on potato soup that were in my set of Ukrainian women’s cookbooks but also the memory of my baba’s creamy potato soup. Plus, this one has added Ukrainian-ness with cabbage and a cup of sour cream that makes it extra creamy.

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Summertime Morel and Mixed Mushrooms in Cream

With morel mushrooms in season, it’s time for this simple recipe – easier to make in a pan than in the Instant Pot because I’m using fresh mushrooms.  For a dried mushroom recipe for winter, check out Instant Pot Pidpenky – Dried mushrooms with gravy.  This side dish has cream with dill and green onions.  Serve it with roasted meats, perohe or egg noodles.

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Instant Pot Sunday Cream Chicken with potatoes and carrots

This recipe will curdle.  It’s just a fact of pressure cooking dairy with the Instant Pot.  But, it totally works out in the end, and no one will know about the (deliberately curdled) disaster.  Plus, it’s made in half the time. Chicken and vegetables are cooked separately with a pot-in-pot.

Chicken cooked in cream is a standard Ukrainian Sunday meal.  This recipe is a much faster, one-pot dinner in about an hour.

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Instant Pot Easy Creamy Summer Borscht

This version of borscht is meant for the spring or summer.  It uses young beets and beet leaves along with fresh, summertime ingredients like dill, fresh peas and fresh broad beans.  Don’t have those things? Frozen dill, frozen peas and canned broad beans make great substitutes.

Also, a new technique that makes Instant Pot borscht-making even faster!

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Instant Pot farm cheese and potato filling for varenyky or pyzirhky

Springing forward, it’s time to start making more spring and Easter foods.  Here’s a great filling for varenyky or pyrizhky.  Pyrizhky? It’s a bread-based dumpling-bun.

This recipe uses the easy dry curd cottage cheese I made.  The filling is full of spring green onions and fresh dill.

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Instant Pot Ukrainian Farm Cheese – Dry Curd Cottage Cheese

It’s easy to make your own dry curd cottage cheese.  This recipe makes a cottage cheese with small curd – perfect for nalysnyky (Ukrainian cheese crepes) or Easter cheese babka.  My homemade Instant Pot dry curd cottage cheese is destined for perishke (or pyrizhky, basically a bread-based baked perohe or pyrogy)

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Instant Pot Nachynka – Cornmeal Casserole

For one of my favourite foods, I grew up thinking that “nachynka” (also nachinka or начинка) was the word for cornmeal.  It actually means stuffing.  Also known as Bukovynska nachynka if it has bacon in it.  But, this is a basic but delicious cornmeal side dish at heart.

Nachynka starts out as a basic polenta recipe to which you add eggs and onions and bake it in the oven.  I made this an embarrassing number of times trying to get this one right for the Instant Pot – and it’s worth it.  Instead of stirring the cornmeal on the stove for 45 minutes, the Instant Pot makes that a quick 9 minutes!

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Saturday Night Noodleburg for the Instant Pot

Cookbooks like Culinary Treasures published by the St. Basil’s Ukrainian Women’s League have been my go-to for figuring out the right proportions for the recipes here.  Originally published in 1967, it must have been popular because my copy is a reprint in 1972.

It’s the collective knowledge of the women at St. Basil’s in Edmonton, Alberta as well as women from across Canada.  Mrs. A. Hlynski of Toronto, your Saturday Night Noodleburg should be a classic – and it’s an easy casserole for an Instant Pot Saturday Night. Inspired by her 1967 recipe, I’ve adapted it for the Instant Pot and sped up the process a little bit, too.

You can’t go wrong with a casserole that’s topped with corn flakes.

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Instant Pot Beet Leaf Holubtsi

Beet leaf cabbage rolls may not make a lot of sense but they’re delicious and completely unlike cabbage holubtsi (holubchi, golubchi, golubtsi, whatever).  Replacing the cabbage with beet leaves is a summer time treat.

Beet leaf holubtsi arranged in a casserole. Red veins in the leaf contrast the bright green leaves.

Like many awesome Ukrainian recipes, this one finishes with being baked in cream.  So, it needs to be finished in a regular oven because that cream totally curdles in the Instant Pot.  A little extra time but totally worth it.

After some research, there are plenty of recipes around called beet leaf holubchi but with bread dough wrapped in beet leaves.  My family always makes beet leaves filled with rice and plenty of dill.  If you’re used to the bread dough version, try this one out!
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