You don’t have to be a certified foodie to realize that food and travel go hand in hand. Enjoying a local dish is almost always the best way to experience a different culture and understanding better its history and tradition. Alexandria Drzazgowski understands this intuitively. The founder and recipe developer behind travel and food blog The Foreign Fork, she offers her audience a taste of the world through the kitchen.
The idea is simple: cooking one meal from every country in the world in alphabetical order. “Every two weeks I’ll start a new country and I’ll start off by giving an in-depth view of the country,” she further explained in an interview with Eat Blog Talk. “So I’ll get fun facts and I’ll give an overview of the history. I’ll talk a little bit about the food culture and the flavors that are normally incorporated into the food in that country. I’ll also just give any other relevant information that might not go into those specific categories.”
After some initial background research comes the main dish. Depending on the country, she’ll share two to five recipes from that country over the next two weeks. “I try to do a main dish and an appetizer, and I always try to do a dessert because I love dessert,” says Drzazgowski. “So I’ll feature some food from that country.”
Like most food blogs, The Foreign Fork began as a passion project. After spending her final semester abroad, Drzazgowski backpacked across Europe. During her time across the ocean, she visited 15 countries in 18 weeks. Her favorite thing to explore in each and every one of them? Food.
“I’ve always loved cooking and baking, but when I was abroad, my love transformed into a border-line obsession,” she admits on her website. “I took countless cooking classes and food tours, I visited every local market I could find, and I would spend hours before dinner researching which restaurant would provide the most authentic experience.” Having returned to Michigan, she decided to keep her passion alive through the kitchen. Hence The Foreign Fork came to be.
With almost 200 countries behind her, Drzazgowski’s hobby has long outgrown its humble beginnings. And though she admits to being an amateur when it comes to cooking, her inquisitiveness makes up for it. “When I’m actually starting to cook from a country, I definitely do a lot of research,” she stresses in the interview. “It’s really important to be representing the culture of the country that you’re cooking in an accurate light and making sure that you’re doing it correctly. So I spend a lot of time doing research before I cook for my country.”
