Middle Easten Cook book tips?

Hummus ME food could one want? Every time i eat it, I felafel afterward. I'm a ful for new cookbooks though.

Israel and turkey also have matbucha kibbeh halva bourekas and loads of other similar dishes, due to sephardic adapting to local cuisine.

Halvah is interesting. Apparently it became Jewish on New York's Lower East Side c. 1910, when local Jews picked it up from Lebanese vendors.

Similar to the way corned beef became Irish, or Irish-American, when Irish New Yorkers picked it up from Jewish butchers as a substitute for boiled bacon, the right kind of bacon not being available here.

Thanks guys for your inputs.

The reason why I prefer lots of photos is that I am new to Middle Eastern cooking and i always find it inspiring to see what the dish looks like that I'm cooking.

To shed some light on the "I'm wanting" thing, whoever said that i was probably typing quiickly withouth thinking was right :) Also, I'm not an English Native speaker (but certainly not from India). I do live in an english speaking country, however, and just pick things up that I hear around me.

I think you would have a hard time convincing an Egyptian that felafel/tamiyya came from Turkey.

felafel is pervasive throughout the region, with variations on size and spices.

p.s., Israelies did not just 'adopt' ME cuisine. a large proportion of the population (i.e., their parents or grandparents) immigrated from countries in the ME (as well as nearby countries not necessarily deemed ME-ern) like North Africa, Turkey, Greece, or even Bulgaria (who do Bourekas and Laben, for instance). Turkish or Egyptian or Persian is what their grandma or parent cooks at home.

Influenced / adapted more than adopted.

One suggestion for finding a cookbook that will wok for you--try the library. I do that all the time--check out cookbooks that I think might be interesting. The only real problem is making sure I keep the book clean while I'm trying out some recipes.

I don't think I ever saw anything resembling falafel in Turkey.

I imagine you can get falafel in Hatay, the former Sanjak of Alexandretta/Iskanderun, the little projection in the southeast corner of Turkey that is linguistically and culturally more Arab than Turkish.

I did some looking around. A blogger in Istanbul says that the place to find it is in Antakya, the seat of the Ha\tay province, near the Syrian border. The blogger was reporting a joyful discovery of a falafel joint in Istanbul .