I grew up in a household where the kitchen was never quiet. My grandmother, Hatice Hanım, spent her mornings at the stove before the rest of the world had woken up — coaxing deep, slow flavours out of dried eggplant, lamb bones, and tomatoes she had put up herself in August. No recipe was ever written down. Everything lived in her hands.

Growing up in Gaziosmanpaşa — one of İstanbul's most vivid and culturally layered districts — I was surrounded by neighbours who had carried recipes from every corner of Anatolia: from the smoky highlands of Erzurum to the olive groves of Hatay, from the vast wheat plains of Konya to the Black Sea coast. Each doorstep told a different culinary story, and I spent years quietly listening.

It was only when I watched those stories begin to disappear — when younger generations stopped cooking and older cooks passed on without anyone writing anything down — that I felt a quiet, urgent need to act. I started visiting villages, sitting with elderly home cooks, and documenting what I found: recipes that rarely, if ever, appear in any cookbook. Dishes that belong to a specific valley, a specific family, a specific season.

ferhatsimsek is not a restaurant review or a food trend page. It is a record — honest, personal, and rooted in the soil. I write these recipes the way I received them: with full respect for their origins, their regional variations, and the people who kept them alive through memory alone. If a dish takes three hours, I will tell you it takes three hours. If the best version requires a wood fire, I will tell you that too.

This is my way of giving back to every grandmother who let me sit at her table and watch — and to every dish that deserves to outlive the generation that created it.