From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is good food.

My hometown is called Kachofka, and it's in the south of Ukraine.

If you look on the map, and you will see Crimea quite prominently.

So Koufka was only 70 kilometers away from the border with Crimea.

It's flat but beautiful. I'd never seen the sky as big as back home. You can be just driving for

hours with golden weed fields and sunflower fields.

And in the past there used to be these wild coval grass swaying like a huge golden sea.

And the sun as bright as those golden fields is just all bright and open and hot.

The soil is black and very fertile, very fecund.

So, you know, we always joke, you drop a little seed and something will just spring up,

you know, a massive tomato plant or something like that. Olya Hercules wasn't in Ukraine when the war broke out.

But living in relative safety, far from the conflict center, doesn't protect one's

core when your family and home are at risk.

Instead, you are catapulted into a cascade of emotions.

Each of us responds to the kind of panic these situations spark in different ways.

For Olia, who has spent her adult life as a food writer and recipe developer in the UK,

her response was to sit down and write her family's story.

As she says in her prologue, you can call Strong Roots a complicated grief response,

if you like. Hi, Olya. Hi, Evan. Thank you so much for having me today. It is such a powerful

story, the way you have embroidered your family's story with the larger story of the history of

Ukraine over a century. When was the last time you were with your family in Ukraine?

The last time all of our family got together was in August 2021. My parents' house was right by the reservoir. We call it

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