Hi, I am Aysegul (pronounced as Eye-che-gueel), the recipe developer, photographer, and voice behind Foolproof Living, based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Before I tested a single recipe for a living, I spent thirteen years in luxury hospitality, working for Starwood Hotels (now part of Marriott) and Rosewood Hotels.
I have been running Foolproof Living since 2013. Every one of my 700+ recipes gets tested in my own kitchen, again and again, until it earns the name “foolproof.”
Experience
My mother was an exceptional cook, the kind other people wanted to learn from. I did not realize it at the time, but I was learning from the best.
She taught me to cook with the reasoning behind every step, not just the steps themselves. I learned how to taste food, and how to respect an ingredient, a technique, a season.
By the time I left Bursa, Türkiye, for college in Ankara, I assumed everyone had grown up the way I had. Most of my classmates did not even know how to cook an egg.
After university, I moved to the United States to build a career in hospitality. I started in housekeeping and worked my way up to hotel manager over the next thirteen years.
Food writing became my second career after my mother passed away suddenly. I found myself cooking her recipes just to feel close to her again, then sharing them online so the people who used to ask her for them finally had somewhere to find them.
That is when Foolproof Living was born.
Over a decade later, I still cook with the same curiosity my mother gave me. Taste everything. Respect the ingredient, the technique, the season.
Expertise
Turkish and Mediterranean home cooking, built for an American kitchen. I have lived in the United States for more than two decades now, longer than I lived in Türkİye.
I have also lived in the British Virgin Islands, Philadelphia, Maine, and Vermont, and every one of those places changed the way I cook.
I know what you actually have in your pantry and what you can find at your grocery store. I am not writing food from far away. I am writing the food I actually cook.
These days, my focus keeps circling back to the food of my heritage. It is where my curiosity lives, and it is where I have the most to teach you.
Recipe development is its own kind of expertise, too. Years of working in luxury hotels taught me to give someone exactly what they need without making them work for it.
Writing recipes in a “foolproof” way is the same idea, just applied to cooking in the kitchen rather than to an unforgettable experience in a luxury hotel.
Education
Bachelor’s Degree, Department of Tourism and Hotel Management, Bilkent University, Türkiye.
A Few Fun Facts About Me
- My house is full of plants. So full that my husband put a hard cap on new ones in 2015. My solution: I propagate instead. Technically, I have not bought a single new plant since.
- Cooking for my husband might be my favorite part of any day. He tastes and gives his stamp of approval to every recipe before it goes on this site.
- I collect cookbooks. I have over 300 of them. I read them in bed at night the way other people read novels.
- I do a girls’ trip to Paris every single year. I am convinced I lived there in a past life.
Stay In The Loop
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- Instagram: A look inside my kitchen day to day, what’s cooking this week, and bits that never quite make it onto the blog.
- YouTube: Watch each recipe come together step by step before you try it yourself with a short video.
- Pinterest: The full recipe collection, saved and sorted so you can find your way back to whatever catches your eye.
- Facebook: Follow along here for new recipes delivered straight to your feed as soon as they are live.
