My Tel Aviv Table

The photography, background stories, history of food and snapshot of life in Tel Aviv is perfection!
Most of these use simple ingredients and let the flavors shine through. The vegetable section is my favorite! So many ideas here. OK take that back, the dessert section is my favorite. Cupboard essentials is super helpful too.

Can't recommend this one enough. All the stars!

Will be purchasing a hardcopy to keep in the kitchen for reference!

Synopsis (from Netgalley, the provider of the book for me to review.)
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Compiled from one family's roots across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, this is a collection of healthy recipes packed with the flavours, aromas and stories of Tel Aviv.

Limor Chen is known for serving up fragrant, exciting, and vibrant dishes to transport you to sun-soaked Tel Aviv. In her debut cookbook gorgeously presented in real cloth-bound hardback, Limor shares her wholesome cooking style, one that centres on health and freshness, ensuring that each recipe is packed with flavour and fragrance while remaining light and nourishing.

These recipes represent the authentic cooking of a food capital of the world, a cultural melting pot of cuisines and inhabitants, ingredients, and aromas:

• Discover multiple ways to use herbs and spices like za'atar with aubergine or aromatic dried limes in an Iranian beef stew.
• Lace addictively tangy sumac into labneh or use it to finish a white wine sauce with brill.
• Share bubbling shakshuka for brunch, fig and goats cheese salad, and a vibrant chopped salad served mezze-style.
• Try stunning cod chermoula with Israeli couscous or a legendary family recipe for vine leaves stuffed with venison and fruit.
• All served with deceptively simple pickles and dips on the side.

With the best of Limor's family’s recipes that evoke the spirit of her home city, this a cookbook that you’ll return to time and again for a taste of Tel Aviv.

Okay, I am not going to lie - my first thought on seeing the author's name was ... is this an Asian-Israeli cookbook? Is this a play on the Chinese food on Christmas day routine/tradition? Nope - this is a love letter to Tel Aviv and its uniqueness - it is decidedly NOT like most beach-towns...and definitely not like the Jersey Shore!

This is the perfect summery, fresh food cookbook – fresh, vibrant foods that you can easily enjoy year-round when you get sick of the stodgy, sickly, heavy foods normally found in winter. I love shakshuka and all other Mediterranean-style foods (and the diet is so healthy for you!) so this book will appeal to those in search of healthy foods that are good for the heart and waistline.

I only have one complaint: as someone who is allergic to cilantro and parsley, it's in a lot of recipes in this book so I may have to figure out some way to garnish or “green up” the recipes as there is a lot of those evil weeds in these recipes. Easy-to-make and easy-to-understand recipes will make this book appeal to cooks of all levels – check it out!

#shortbutsweetreviews

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a great recipe book! There's a lot of unique recipes and they're broken down and presented in approachable ways. There's also beautiful pictures of the food which helps make it easy to pick what to make. There's sweet, savory, and vegetarian options and I found quite a few recipes I want to try. There's also information on common spices like sumac and zaatar to bring the dishes together. Overall a great dive into some interesting recipes.

This is beautifully presented recipe book, the colourful photography really reinforces the appeal of the Mediterranean diet!

This book starts with a personal introduction from the author, this is lovely and adds to the appeal of the book.

The recipes are simply stunning, and are categorised in a logical manner, under the headings of 'brunch & dips', 'vegetables & salads', 'hero dishes & sharing plates', 'sweet things' and 'drinks'. A final section 'cupboard essentials' feels like a bonus!

The 'nectarine summer cake' is really calling to me, demanding to be made, as is the 'caramelised butternut squash with green beans & goats cheese' from the 'vegetables & salads' section.

Overall I was impressed by the range and diversity of recipes, with a wide selection for meat lovers and vegetarians alike!

My thanks to NetGalley, author and publisher for the opportunity to review this book in exchange for an advance copy.

A mix of intriguing recipes from Israel. Recipes seem fairly simple/easy to follow, though you may have trouble finding some of the ingredients.

I devoured this book and will definitely buy a copy for myself and recommend it to my friends and family. It has a refreshing slant on middle eastern cooking. Every recipe had me salivating for more.

I love cookery books, especially middle eastern fusion, so this book is right for me. Before delving in, I knew very little about Tel Aviv so not only does this book contain some wonderful recipes but I have a greater understanding of place and culture. What a great book. One to add to my shelf as a printed copy.

This is a wonderful cookbook. A blending of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean recipes that are delicious, creative and interesting. The recipes are easy to follow and are accompanied by wonderful photographs. I loved the stories the author shared. Food is not only cultural, but a way to bring people together. I made quite a few of the recipes and yum!

What a lovely book with lovely stories and lovely pictures. It gives a good history of the food of the area and a backstory of life in the area as well. Better still the recipes sound so delicious and the ingredients are mostly things you have on hand or can easily buy which makes it even better.

So many easy and tasty recipes to try, and each section has a bit of a theme so it makes it easy to look at and decide what recipe you want and need to try. The recipes are easy to follow and with many vegetable recipes and some hints an tips that will definitely come in handy, this is a book I will use from here on out!

Great book and highly recommend.

Thank you NetGalley and Watkins Publishing for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

If you love Ottolenghi but find the long ingredient lists a faff, this is a much more practical solution. A few recipes that are obvious at the start, but after that, just delicious. I could eat it cover to cover.

What a lovely book, full of sunshine. I discovered plenty of very tempting recipes. The section on vegetables particularly caught my eye including many delicious options. Fans of Ottolenghi will discover a kindred spirit. A book guaranteed to make your day and meals superb.

This is a fantastic cookbook. The recipes delve into dishes from Israel, the rest of the Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa. The recipes are clear and easy to follow and the photos are absolutely stunning. The layout of the pages is very clean and crisp. I could see the average home cook easily making quite a few dishes at home.

My Tel Aviv Table by Limor Chen is absolutely stunning.

Starting with her Israeli family roots, Chen takes us on a journey through a host of amazing dishes. Starting with brunch and dips, then onto veg and salads, sharing and hero dishes and finishing with sweet treats and drinks. The descriptions and pictures add to the quality of the recipes. This feels like Ottolenghi for the family (with more manageable ingredient lists and instructions).

I am genuinely excited about this book and I don’t doubt it will be a kitchen staple.

Thanks to Netgalley and Watkins Books for an ARC.

Lovely cookery book with beautiful photos of Tel Aviv. The recipes are all.explained clearly, with photos of every dish. There are a lot of colourful and interesting vegetable dishes., that can be made fairly easily.
Recommended.

A very attractive recipe book. Many of the dishes will be familiar to fans of Ottolenghi, and some to English readers (apple and plum crumble, anyone?), but there is also a selection of unfamiliar and appealing recipes that sound worth trying.

This book makes me so happy--and hungry!!!

I have been blessed to travel to Israel twice, and I'll admit I enjoyed the food much more on my second visit than the first. My taste buds have matured exponentially, that's for sure! So, that made me appreciate this cookbook all the more; it will certainly have a place of honor on my bookshelf, next to Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's Jerusalem: A Cookbook.

Many (many!) of the recipes look delicious, and I am super excited to make them. I especially loved that the beverage section was alcohol free, as I quit drinking a few years ago; this was a refreshing and pleasant surprise.

The book is a wonderful combination of familiar and cutting edge, drawing me in with my favorites (Kofta! Tahini! Hummus!) and pushing me outside my comfort zone (vine leaves stuffed with venison and fruit--this might get me to try dolmas!). And the photography is fantastic; I only wish there were more!

I'm sufficiently ready to visit Tel Aviv now, a city I sadly wasn't able to visit as anticipated on my last trip. At least in the interim, I have all the food inspo needed here. :) Oh, happy day!

I received an eARC of the book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

The perfect word to describe My Tel Aviv is mouthwatering. Page after page of recipes that I wanted to try straight away! Like Limor Chen's mother I am from Eastern Europe. My country has been under the influence of various historical powers but when it comes to food, I feel we took a lot from Turkish cuisine, but we also have some Greek influences. To add to this, I have lived in various countries, in particular Italy and we've been frequenting a lot of Turkish, Arab restaurants. Therefore many of this recipes were in many ways familiar to me, or reminded me of good times. So really, going through the pages of this book infused me with nostalgia, but in positive, heartwarming way!
How many time did I eat Aubergine Dip? Or Stuffed Vine Leaves? Or kataifi? But despite that, Chen managed to add something new to each one, making me want to try it her way!

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Tel Aviv Table is an absolutely beautiful cookbook. The photography is stunning and the recipes delicious. I'm a big fan of Israeli food and I can't wait to cook more from this book, but what I have tried has been excellent.

I will say that this won't be one of my everyday cookbooks just due to some of the ingredients not being things I necessarily keep on hand at home, but that certainly doesn't apply to everyone!

I love Israeli food and couldn’t wait to try the recipes. They’re great. And the photography is stunning. Highly recommended

I love Middle East cookery and this was an excellent book to learn more about it. Loved the illustrations and appreciated the book.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This is an outstanding cook book. I thought it would be similar to other middle eastern cook books that I have, but this is a definite must buy for me when it's published. Some recipes, even simple dishes such as Labneh, use a better approach than my other cook books for preparation. Beautifully illustrated, the recipes are very well described and it's nice to have the commentary on the background to the dishes as well as descriptions of some of the rarer ingredients (barberries, dried limes, etc.).

The recipes themselves are a nice balance of brunch type things, veggie, fish, finally meats. The balance is definitely appealing. Reading it has inspired me to have more brunches going forward.

A must read, must buy. Excellent.