Hrechka z Hrybamy (гречка з грибами, mushroom buckwheat)

Brown is not a small color when it smells like the forest after rain. Tip roasted hrechka into a hot dry pot and it wakes up nutty, then the mushrooms collapse into their own dark juices, onion goes sweet at the edges, and the whole thing turns glossy with unrefined sunflower oil, Ukraine in a bottle of oil.

On a Polesian table this is a side until it is supper. With a fermented cucumber, a spoon of smetana if it's not a fast day, and a fistful of dill, it feeds six politely or four who came in cold. Aunt Nadia once wrote only "mushrooms until it sounds right," which sounds maddening until you hear the pan: first wet and hissing, then quiet, then the sharper scrape of frying. That's when they are ready.

The trick is not to boil the life out of the mushrooms with the grain. Cook the buckwheat gently until the kernels open but keep their corners, build the zasmazhka, the slow-sweated onion, carrot, and mushrooms, beside it, then fold them together at the end so the sweetness and dark mushroom oil cling to the grains instead of vanishing into the pot. Make more than you think. Hrechka reheats like it was waiting for tomorrow.