I grew up in a small apartment in Gaziantep, where the kitchen was never just a room — it was the beating heart of the household. My grandmother, Fatma, would wake before anyone else to start a pot of menemen, and by the time the rest of us stumbled in half-asleep, the whole flat smelled of blistered peppers and warm cumin. That ritual, repeated a thousand mornings, is where my love of food was born.

I never trained at a culinary school. What I know, I learned by standing beside the women in my family, watching their hands move with quiet confidence — no recipes written down, no timers set. Just instinct, repetition, and an almost sacred attention to ingredients. My mother could tell a good olive oil by smell alone. My aunt judged a market tomato by the sound it made when tapped. Those are the lessons no textbook could teach.

When I moved to London in my late twenties, I quickly realised that no restaurant — however talented its chef — could replicate the tastes I carried in my memory. So I started cooking in earnest, tracking down the right dried chillies, the correct grade of bulgur, the one pomegranate molasses that had the right balance of tart and sweet. My small London kitchen became a laboratory and a refuge, and my friends became very willing guinea pigs.

The motivation for starting ilhan-kaya was simple and selfish at first: I wanted to write everything down before I forgot it. Turkish home cooking is an oral tradition, and every year we lose a little more of it as the older generation passes and the younger one reaches for convenience. I wanted to preserve what I know — the real, unfiltered version, not the Instagram-friendly approximation.

But the blog became something more. It became a conversation. Readers from Ankara and Amsterdam, from Birmingham and Buenos Aires, started writing to me about their own grandmothers, their own kitchens, their own versions of a recipe I'd shared. That exchange — messy, warm, utterly human — is why I keep cooking, keep writing, and keep sharing every honest, imperfect, deeply personal recipe I have. I hope you find something here that feels like home.