Mihriban Özkan grew up in Gaziantep — a city many consider the culinary capital of Türkiye — where the scent of red pepper paste drying on rooftops and the rhythmic sound of copper-smiths filled every childhood memory. Her mother cooked from memory; her grandmother from even older memory still. At the age of seven, she began writing down the recipes she witnessed in small school notebooks, afraid that one day those hands would stop, and the knowledge would vanish with them.

Those notebooks became the seed of mihribanozkan. Over two decades, Mihriban travelled through the regional kitchens of the Black Sea coast, the Aegean highlands, Central Anatolian villages, and the southeastern provinces, collecting recipes not from restaurants or cookbooks, but directly from the women and men who still cook by instinct and season. She has sat in village courtyards in Kastamonu learning to make taş ekmeği, and spent winter evenings in Siirt listening to elders describe spice combinations passed down through at least four generations.

By profession, Mihriban is a literature teacher — which is perhaps why she approaches food the way a writer approaches a manuscript: with patience, precision, and a deep respect for the original voice. She believes that a recipe stripped of its context is only half the story. On this site, you will always find not just the ingredients and method, but the region, the occasion, and often the family who first shared it with her.

mihribanozkan carries no advertisements, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links. It was built — and continues to grow — purely out of love for a culinary heritage that deserves to be documented before it fades. Every recipe published here has been tested in a home kitchen, just as it was intended to be cooked.