Welcome to Vikalinka! I’m Julia and this is my corner of the internet, thanks for visiting it.
Here you’ll find recipes from all around the world and for every occasion. I’ve worked to make them suitable for home cooks, like me, who are short on time and big on nutrition. That’s not to say you won’t find the odd recipe that is a lengthy labour of love! But what they all have in common is that they are healthy, budget-friendly, use accessible, seasonal ingredients and taste utterly delicious.
Whether you are rushing to get a middle-of-the-week family dinner on the table, planning an intimate date night, or masterminding an unforgettable Christmas feast, you have come to the right place. And there are some tantalising snacks and classic cocktails here too! Mine’s a refreshing and summery blood orange margarita.
How I got started
I’ve been cooking since I was thirteen years old. First, for my parents and brother, cooking traditional Eastern European recipes that were made from scratch and where there was no such thing as processed or convenience food. FYI my Siberian dumplings pelmeni were always a family favourite.
In the late 90s, I moved to Minnesota (US) to attend college, then on to Canada to settle, and I continued to cook for other people (I actually worked in a professional kitchen); my friends, and the man who is now my husband. Cooking was very different there to what I was used to; unfamiliar recipes, ingredients that were certainly not available back home, and so many choices of cuisine it was dazzling!
Most recently, now based in the UK, I’ve cooked for my own family: a husband of 25 years and my two children. This is when I realised I wanted to combine the wholesome approach to cooking of my childhood, with the wealth of diversity I had encountered through travelling and living in 6 different countries.
So, in 2012, the Vikalinka blog was born. Originally, I hadn’t intended for it to be a professional forum, just a way to take photos, express my love of food and record the family recipes for my kids.
However, it turned out I was more qualified than I thought and thanks to nearly 35 years of cooking experience, which included working in commercial kitchens, taking more than a few vacation cooking courses, as well as learning from locals in places like Italy and France and the Philippines, I realised I had some knowledge and a skill set that could be more widely shared.
In 2017, I quit my teaching job to focus full time on expanding Vikalinka to bring my readers as many nutritious, delicious, easy-to-master meals as I could manage.
Vikalinka today
From its humble beginnings in 2012 and with just a handful of dishes, photos and followers, Vikalinka has grown to over 950 recipes that can be found on this website, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook. With more than 1.5M visitors to the site per month and surpassing 120,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 500,000 followers on Pinterest in 2025, I am beyond proud of what we are achieving.
But one of my favourite things that has emerged over this time is interacting with the readership. I love seeing their own snaps of the dishes they’ve mastered (or attempted!) and hearing their thoughts on the recipes from the blog. It’s always so good to hear from you!
As well as developing recipes for my own channels, I’ve also featured in:
- The New York Times
- Elle
- Forbes
- Town & Country
- HuffPost
- Yahoo!
- Tasty
- Taste of Home
- Parade
We live in a digital world, but there’s nothing like seeing your work in print!
Who is Vikalinka?
At the start, Vikalinka was a one-woman show. I developed the recipes, took the photos, created the content and posted it to my blog. Since then, Vikalinka has truly grown into a family affair.
My husband of 25 years, Brad, recently joined me to work on the blog full-time. His favourite recipe on the blog? Easy! Slow Cooker Italian Beef Ragu. As well as making videos of me at work in the kitchen, he supports me in the strategic side of things and runs the business, so all is left to me is the creative process. I should probably also mention the ‘research’ too- that involves going out to restaurants and tasting food. He’s heavily involved!
Then, there’s my 21-year-old son, Mitchell (fave recipe: Beef Tacos). While he’s not engrossed in his university Business studies, he assists with the website management.
And my 19-year-old daughter, Vika. Vika is… well, chief opinion-giver and a social media boss. And probably most importantly, the brand’s namesake. Vika is short for Victoria in Russian, and since she was little, we’ve referred to her affectionately as Vikalinka. The name just kind of stuck, with her and the blog! Her favourite dish…. Thai Green Curry.
Vikalinka recipes
My focus is always on the cook’s convenience and the eaters’ health and wellbeing. In my own everyday cooking, I look for meals that are quick, easy, and require readily available, fresh and seasonal ingredients. I don’t want to hunt supermarkets looking for yak’s milk or the fruit of the flum-flum tree- who has time for that? And I want to offer diners a balanced meal that’s satisfying, but so tasty it leaves them wanting more!
The process of cooking has always been very therapeutic for me. There’s something relaxing and meaningful about spending time alone in my kitchen, focusing with intention on a recipe and developing it to better suit my family’s and my readers’ tastes. Or figuring out how to increase a traditional recipe’s nutritional value, or take a much-loved, labour-intensive original and find a way of making it that is more accessible to all skill levels. And then, the most rewarding bit of course, is when my diners ask me to cook it again.
And through the blog, I get to share all that with a wider audience. I just hope that some of that happiness and satisfaction I get from serving food to my favourite people trickles through to other households too.
It is so important to me to record the recipes of my childhood, and the passion for food and cooking I discovered then, as well as more modern and international recipes. I want to share them with home cooks today from all around the world and for them to be passed down to our children, the cooks of the future.
So, what’s my favourite? French Coq au Vin over Brown Butter Mashed Potatoes.
I hope you’ll visit often and be inspired by the recipes on Vikalinka. Let me know your favourites!
To learn more about me read my interview with Food Bloggers of Canada, a podcast on Makers and Mystics, where we discuss The Art of Food and Behind the scenes with Vikalinka.
