Meet Alexandria from The Domestic Spoon

Hi there! My name is Alexandria Drzazgowski Ulmer, and I am the recipe developer, taste tester, photographer, marketing manager, and blogger behind The Domestic Spoon, a food blog where I share easy entertaining recipes ready in under 30 minutes.

The Domestic Spoon was born out of my desire to simplify cooking and make hosting guests easy and painless. On this site, you’ll find appetizers, desserts, drinks, and main courses – all wonderfully easy and perfect for serving to a crowd while entertaining. And the best part? Almost every single one can be made in 30 minutes or less!

I hope you find that The Domestic Spoon gives you the confidence to spend more time with your family and friends, with delicious recipes at every event!

Background

When I was 11, I fell in love with cooking. That year, my hometown had published a tiny newspaper-style cookbook, where local businesses published their favorite family recipes.

I made my very first dish, my Hot Artichoke Dip (which I have since adapted from the original recipe to make it even more delicious), and I was hooked! Watching my family eat my creation and hearing their compliments was the best feeling.

After that, I wanted to keep going! My mom, not the biggest fan of cooking herself, told me that if I wanted to make one recipe per week, she would buy the ingredients for me and do the clean up. I was in heaven, baking up applesauce cookies, experimenting with smoked salmon crostini, and serving dips galore. I think we both thought we got the winning end of that bargain 😉

Pretty soon, I became the go-to in the family for any social event, charged with the task of making a delicious appetizer or dessert for every party that we were asked to “bring a dish to pass”. I had fun experimenting with new recipes, and being asked to bring back some old “famous” recipes felt pretty good too.

I started keeping my recipes in an electronic cookbook, typing them up every time I had a successful dish. It’s funny now to look back on the fact that even in childhood, I was paving my path for recipe development to become my job!

Blog Story

You may know me from my sister site, The Foreign Fork, where I am on a mission to cook a meal from every country in the world. I started The Foreign Fork in 2018 after backpacking to 15 different countries in Europe and learning about the food culture of each one. I loved the intersection of food and culture and came home with the idea to start a food blog where I could continue exploring the world from my kitchen. I have been in love with blogging ever since.

In 2021, I was able to leave my sales job and take food blogging full time! In 2024, I had built The Foreign Fork up to a good place, and realized that there was an entire subsection of food that I LOVED but wasn’t getting the chance to really dive into — appetizers and desserts. I was loving making national dishes and 6 hour recipes from remote corners of the world, but my hosting heart, forged in my childhood, was sometimes missing the simplicity of those easy appetizers and desserts that my love for cooking was built on!

Putting double chocolate chip cookies and fried pickle dip on The Foreign Fork felt out of place, so I finally decided to start a second website that would be a specific platform for my home-grown recipe. And thus, The Domestic Spoon was born!

It has since grown into a one-stop shop for Easy Appetizers and Desserts for Entertaining, All Ready in Under 30 Minutes!

This works out nicely for both of us, because with managing the rest of life, I, like many of you, needed these recipes to be quick, easy, and delicious. I hope they’ll fit nicely into your busy life.

Recipe Inspiration

Some of the recipes on The Domestic Spoon are recipes that I have been making since childhood, like my Goat Cheese Appetizer or my Hello Dolly Dessert Bars.

Others, like my M&M Cookie Bars or my Brie Puff Pastry Bites are recipes that I have either had at one point in my life and LOVED or entirely new recipes that I get inspiration for and then can’t rest until I figure them out.

In order for a recipe to find it’s way onto The Domestic Spoon, it needs to fit a few different elements of criteria:

It has to be something you can serve while entertaining, including appetizers, desserts, salads, sides, or main courses.
It has to be ready in under 30 minutes (or, if it’s a crockpot recipe like my Crockpot Christmas Crack, have only a few minutes of prep time).
It has to be something that will make someone ask you for the recipe once they try it. You’re going to be the hero of every party 😉
BONUS: The less ingredients the better. And they have to be easy to find (which is the complete opposite of the cross-world shipping I must do for recipes on The Foreign Fork).

Once I get a recipe idea, I test it until I love it. Some recipes, like my Peanut Butter Pretzel Bites, are perfect on the first try. And some, like my Easy Chocolate Chip Cookies, take 5-10 tests before I am totally satisfied with the result and confident that you can make them perfectly as well!

If you ever find a recipe that doesn’t turn out as good as you were hoping, please feel free to leave me a comment letting me know! I’ll be happy to rework it again to try to figure out a problem.

National Publications

I have been honored to have been featured by some national publications including:

Check out my Press Page to see a full list of my appearances!

Professional Career

Believe it or not, I have only had one other full time job before food blogging. While most food bloggers in the industry get their starts around the time of marriage or starting a family, my foray in the industry began much earlier.

I graduated from college in 2018 with a degree in Professional Writing and a Track in Digital and Technical Writing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but over the course of my college career, I had essentially been learning the basics of how to be a blogger, including running a website, writing emails, managing social media accounts etc. The world works in mysterious ways!

I had tried out a few different internships with my degree during college, including editing manuscripts at a literary agency in New York City, working in marketing for Michigan State University, and communicating sales compliance at Stryker. None of them had felt quite right, and by the time I graduated, I was lost and confused, not sure what I should do.

A mentor of mine suggested that I would be great at sales, so I got my first job out of college at ADP, selling payroll software to small business owners. I took to the job naturally, and become one of the fastest promoted sales reps in company history, winning trips around the world for surpassing my quota!

Despite this, I knew that my passion lay in the blog I had started on the same day that I started my career at ADP (August 22, 2018 was a big day!). For a while ADP gave me “Blog Mondays” which meant that I didn’t have to work on Mondays as long as I was hititng my quota. It gave me an opportunity to grow the blog before I was able to leave fully, and I could not be more grateful to them for supporting my dreams.

In 2021, I left ADP and started blogging full time. I haven’t looked back since, and am so happy with my life and my career! The blogs have ballooned into more than I could ever have dreamed and I am so grateful for the life steps that got me here.

Personal Life

In 2022, my husband Matt and I moved from our hometown in Metro Detroit, Michigan to Charlotte, North Carolina. After 11 years of dating (high school sweethearts), we finally got married in 2023!

Outside of food blogging, my other major passion is travel. I have been to 32 states and 33 countries! I am always looking for my next adventure, and have spent a month in Guatemala learning spanish, ridden for two weeks on the back of a motorbike in Vietnam, and have led group trips to Morocco and Peru with blog readers!

I am very close with my family and my entire extended family spends a lot of time together, specifcially at our cottage on Harsens Island, Michigan. Spending time with my cousins, my aunties and uncles, and my cousins’ children are some of the happiest moments of life. I cherish evey second we get to spend together.

Learning about the world, seeing different cultures, and tasting foods always brings me joy. But so does spending time making memories at home with my favorite people.

That is why I am so proud of these two blogs. The Foreign Fork exists to help you learn about the world outside of your home; The Domestic Spoon helps you to make memories inside of it, with the people that matter most.

So browse around, find something that excites you, and get cooking! I’m so happy that you’re here 🙂