On a sunny weekday afternoon, chef Bonnie Morales leads me past the Q subway line in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. We are going shopping for Russian food. Morales owns Kachka , a restaurant in Portland, Ore., that serves food from the former Soviet Union. It's one of the most popular places to eat in one of the hottest food cities in the country. Now, Morales has a new cookbook — also called Kachka . Its publication inspired this jaunt to Little Odessa, the kind of neighborhood where the child of Eastern European immigrants feels at home. "Because there's such a concentration of people from the former Soviet Union," Morales explains. People like Morales' own Russian Jewish immigrant parents. (Her husband is part Mexican; her maiden name is Frumkin.) She was born in the Chicago area, and as a child in the early 1990s, her relatives flocked to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Every week, it seemed, her parents threw another party welcoming new
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