Summer equals long lazy days where no one fancies spending too long in the kitchen and light meals are the order of the day. Enter Salata by restaurateurs Michael Rantissi and Kristy Frawley. This is a book that pushes the boundaries of what defines a salad – for the record, to the authors, it is any vegetable, raw or cooked, cold or warm. So some of the recipes may not meet your initial expectations. But they certainly won’t disappoint them, especially given the diversity of flavours. The whole of the Med is yours for the taking, with recipes inspired by Spanish, French, Turkish, Italian, Greek and North African flavour profiles. There are salads for weekdays, salads for entertaining and festivities and salads that can serve as a side or as part of a mezze-style meal. In what might be the most useful part of the book, there is a chapter called ‘Everything That Goes with Salad’, which has subsections for dressings, crunchy bits, zesty flavour bombs, and protein hits. These are an arsenal to max any salad you’re making with flavour and texture and I can see them becoming some of the most used pages in the book. Peppered throughout there are profiles for some of the most commonly used salad vegetables, talking about their flavour profiles and how best to treat them. With more than 90 recipes, you could cook one recipe a day from this book and be set for summer. And, such a diverse range of flavours in this one book, you’ll certainly never be bored or hear any complaints about ‘Salad? Again?’ SÍANA CLIFFORD