A Little About Me
& This Kitchen

I grew up in Bağcılar, one of Istanbul's liveliest working-class neighbourhoods, in a flat where the kitchen was never truly quiet. My grandmother, Fatma Hanım, treated cooking as a kind of conversation — with the seasons, with her guests, with the land she had left behind in Anatolia. By the time I could reach the counter, I was already folding gözleme dough and stirring pots of mercimek çorbası while she narrated every step from memory, never once consulting a written recipe.

Those recipes lived entirely in her hands, and I was terrified of losing them. So I started writing things down — ratios, techniques, the specific way she rubbed dried mint between her palms before it went into the pot. My mother added her own chapter: a love of Aegean vegetables, charred peppers, and the kind of olive oil that costs almost nothing at the local producer but tastes like sunlight. Between the two of them, I inherited a whole culinary vocabulary before I ever attended a single cooking class.

What truly shaped my palate, though, was the Bağcılar pazarı — the open-air market two streets from our building. Every Saturday, vendors arrived with aubergines still dusty from the field, bundles of flat-leaf parsley, trays of fresh white cheese, and pomegranates so heavy they had to be carried in both hands. I learned there that quality ingredients need almost nothing from the cook — just respect, heat, and time. That conviction has guided every dish I have made since.

engin-ariy exists because I believe honest food deserves honest writing. No fussy restaurant plating, no ingredients flown in from three continents, no recipes engineered for a glossy magazine shoot. Just real flavors, real techniques, and the stories behind them — the kind my grandmother told me while the lentils simmered and the bread browned in the oven. If a recipe appears here, it is because I have cooked it a dozen times, fed it to people I love, and trust it completely.