Vegetarian 30-minute Turkish Cookbook, by Sarah Beattie (Thorsons, £6.99 in UK)

You can't really recreate Turkish food without authentic ingredients - the proper cheese, decent olive oil, those little mild…

You can't really recreate Turkish food without authentic ingredients - the proper cheese, decent olive oil, those little mild green peppers which look like chilis until you bite them and discover they're for wimps - but Sarah Beattie has a brave stab at it. The "vegetarian" tag is a bit of a red herring, since Turkish cuisine uses remarkably little meat anyway, but if you follow these recipes to the letter, you'll produce reasonably realistic-looking - and totally yummy - versions of such Turkish staples as cacik (cucumber and yoghurt salad), mercimek corbasi (lentil soup) and zeytinagli taze fasulye (green beans in olive oil).

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Arminta Wallace

Arminta Wallace

Arminta Wallace is a former Irish Times journalist