Awhile back, while I was in the midst of frantic wedding planning, author Sibel Hodge reached out to me to see if I would be interested in reviewing her book A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey. Being a lover of new foods, especially ones with a Mediterranean flair, I was happy to have the opportunity. Unfortunately I needed the time to dedicate in order to do it justice, so it wasn’t until earlier this month that I was able to check it out on my kindle.

The book as a whole is very well formatted and thought out. It includes several informative chapters at the beginning discussing Sibel’s own experiences with Turkish foods, Turkish cuisine in general, measurement tips and conversions, and other helpful cooking tips for this type of food. This is followed by a variety of recipes broken into chapters by type of meal.

It was hard to pick just a few recipes to try (as everything sounded so mouthwatering and delicious), but I ultimately settled on trying out the following recipes, through which I’ll make some comments.

.Yoghurt Soup: This is one of the more traditional Turkish dishes in Sibel’s book, and seeing as I had never made anything like it I felt I was taking a bit of a risk. For one, I was worried that the yoghurt would curdle when heated…The directions were easy to follow and it was actually a quick and simple recipe to make. As Sibel says “this Turkish dish really is delicious”. It came out GREAT! It had a sweet but unique taste that both Mike and I described as making our “taste buds jump”. I attribute this to the sumac, which I have never used in a recipe. It was also a dense dish, which combined with it’s flavorfulness meant that it didn’t take much to satisfy your hunger or tastebuds.

Baked Eggs: We wanted to try a breakfast dish, as there was an entire chapter dedicated to this often ignored meal. Again the recipe was simple to follow, and the dish didn’t require much preparation and maintenance. Rather than baking in two individual tins, I baked this in on square dish. This dish was a conflicting one for us.While baked eggs themselves taste SO much better than typical eggs over easy, Mike and I weren’t a big fan of the flavor as a whole. The mix of flavors was enticing and interesting, but it just seemed that there was too much oregano and parsley. This might honestly be chalked up to the fact that in the morning we are simple eaters, so I’ll be making this dish again with less herbs. One suggestion however is that the herbs should say whether or not they should be fresh or dried (as the amount varies depending). We personally used dried for both, which might be why the flavoring was so strong in that area.

Caramelized Roast Vegetables with Feta Cheese:

Let me start off by saying that this is oddly my first time cooking with Eggplant. I don’t know… I just was never a fan of it until recently, and it isn’t typically a vegetable used in my ethnic background for cooking. But, I liked it in this! I made a few modifications to this dish because when I went shopping some of the vegetables weren’t available as stated. I substituted: one orange pepper for one yellow pepper, and small mushrooms for large mushrooms. Again, the instructions were simple and recipe itself rather simple. The general overview? Making this had me simply giddy and honed in on using my senses to cook. It was honestly one of the most colorful and delightfully pungent dishes that I have ever cooked. It was so delightfully pungent that Mike’s parents almost demanded that I give them some to eat when it was done. They and I agree that it was delicious. It was a different mix of flavors (I would have never thought to mix balsamic vinegar and honey) than normal, and made for a great winter dish. However, I think I still need to warm up to hot feta as I wasn’t sure how I enjoyed that consistency.

Overall A Gluten Free Taste of Turkey is a really fun book to cook with if you are looking for some fun unique recipes using (mostly) common ingredients. While the some of the recipes are rather elaborate, most of the ingredients are easy to find, and it gets you cooking old foods in a new way. I can say that I really enjoyed how simply the recipes were written, and you could tell how Sibel truly has a love for food and sharing these recipes through the way she personally includes an introduction to each recipe. On final touch, which is perfect for me currently is that Sibel also labels each recipes as Vegetarian and/or Vegan , and offers suggests to modify ingredients to make them so if the original recipe isn’t. This is all around a great Turkish adventure in food form, and I thank Sibel for offering us gluten free folks and opportunity to take the journey along with her!