About

The kitchen this all comes from

Who’s cooking, why it’s here, and how anything earns a place in the journal.

how it started

It started with my dad and my Baba. My dad loved restaurants the way some people love libraries. He would taste something, work out how it was made, or just ask the chef outright. Then we would go grocery shopping, he would make me pick the ingredients, and we would cook it together.

My Baba had a huge garden in Russia and made ridiculously good food out of the simplest things. She is the reason I still believe whole ingredients handled well beat clever ones handled badly.

During Covid, with nothing better to do, I started recreating meals from the places my mom, my sister, and I had travelled, teaching myself dishes I never thought I would make. My recipes lived on loose papers and in my head. Pear & Thyme is where they finally settle down, so everyone can cook my food and no one has to remember it. Least of all me.

Katya walking on a tree-lined street in summer

The name

Say it out loud.

Pear and thyme. Pair and time. Pairing is how I cook: a dish with a drink, a menu with a season, a table with the people around it. Time is what I actually put in: the season it grows, the hour it braises, the evening it gets eaten.

And literally, a pear is the kind of simple whole ingredient my Baba would approve of, and thyme runs through half of these recipes. The name was hiding the whole philosophy. I just had to say it out loud.

how I cook

Whole ingredients, in season, made for a full table.

I cook from things you can name. Butter and flour and fruit that was grown somewhere, not a shortcut with a long ingredients list. It takes a little more time and pays it back every single time.

Some nights the table gets a five course menu, some nights a simple protein and vegetable, which never lets you down. Everyone who eats here often has a handful of dishes they ask for again and again.

Nothing goes in the journal until I’ve made it enough times to trust it. Then I write it down plainly, so you can make it your own.