Nistisima: The secret to delicious Mediterranean vegan food, the Sunday Times bestseller and voted OFM Best Cookbook

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Supperclub host and occasional Hot Dinners contributor Melissa Thompson is celebrating Jamaican food with her debut cookbook. The Guild of Food Writers award-winning writer has come up with a book that intersperses recipes on classics like saltfish fritters and her own takes like smoky aubergine rundown with essays on the evolution of the country's cuisine.

Nistisima, The secret to delicious Mediterranean vegan food Nistisima, The secret to delicious Mediterranean vegan food

Some ingredients I either hadn't heard of or would find hard to source such as mastic, mehlepi, pul biber, okra, pomegranate molasses, taro, but most of the recipes use simple and easy to find inexpensive ingredients. Whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or simply want to eat more plant-based food, Nistisima offers you tried and tested recipes that celebrate the very best of this tradition – all bursting with flavour and all surprisingly vegan. Nistisima means fasting food – food eaten during Lent and other times of fasting observed by those of Orthodox faith. Mostly this involves giving up meat and dairy and instead using vegetables, pulses and grains to create easy, delicious dishes that all just happen to be vegan. The author explains these are fasting foods for the Greek Orthodox church. The idea of 'fasting food' seems nonsensical to me, like cold heat or non alcoholic alcohol. They mean fasting not as we think of it as not eating but as having a day when you don't eat meat and dairy. Although this also doesn't seem to make sense as olive oil is banned on fasting days and the recipes use lots of olive oil.Winner of this year’s OFM Awards for best cookbook, Londoner Georgina Hayden couldn’t have grown up any closer to restaurants, being brought up in a flat above her paternal grandparents’ Greek Cypriot taverna in Tufnell Park. The book is inspired by all the days of fasting found in the Orthodox Christian calendar, so you'll find an abundance of naturally vegan dishes from the Mediterranean, Middle East and Eastern Europe. It's hard to believe that Quo Vadis chef Jeremy hasn't graced us with a cookbook before now, but this was certainly worth waiting for. In it, he distils a lifetime's worth of knowledge and passion for cooking, with the seasons as a guide to what to cook with and when. "This cookbook is extraordinary," said Stanley Tucci. You will all want a copy. Once in a while, a new cookbook makes you think “Genius!” This is one of those – a collection of mainly vegan recipes from countries where abstaining from meat for religious or cultural reasons is the norm… Carefully researched and lovingly written, and the recipes are excellent' This book is the sunny window that everyone needs: open it to flood your kitchen with Mediterranean sun, delicious food and great stories. Georgina takes these ancient traditions and fits them to our modern kitchens with impeccable style and flare; surely lent has never tasted so good

Nistisima: The Secret to Delicious Mediterranean Vegan Food

Some of the dishes do require specialized foods, but the author does list suppliers (mostly, if not all, UK based). The metric system is used, so US readers get some program that will do the conversions for you.His first book focused on meat, but chef and restaurateur Josh Katz has gone fully plant-based for his follow-up cookbook. Recipes include a new take on the restaurant's signature cauliflower shawarma and there's also a recipe for the perfect dough if you want to make your own pide or lahmacun.