Embracing College Cooking
By Isabel Berckemeyer
In their first year of school freshmen learn a lot of information, and they learn it quickly. They learn things including their new schedule, dealing with more free time, being in a larger environment, making new friends, joining different clubs, and all the new intricacies of daily life. For me, I had to learn how to navigate the dining hall and face that my parents would not be there to cook meals for me.
It may sound silly, but my parent’s cooking is some of the best. My mom is Italian and my dad is Peruvian; our family meals rotate between delicious recipes from my mom’s Italian nana and childhood recipes from my Dad. At school, I miss my family and those dinners.
I had to quickly adjust to dining hall food, even though it made me feel queasy and did not satisfy my taste buds most nights. It took a while, but eventually the meals served at the dining hall became familiar; I found the foods that I loved and those that I really hated. I came to rely on stir fry nights, wraps, the salad bar, conn chicken, Wing It Wednesday, and General Tso.
However, after my sophomore year and a semester abroad, I returned to Villanova and began to live in an apartment. This meant that I had a full kitchen and didn’t need a meal plan. While this seemingly sounded a lot better than eating from different dining halls and relying on what I thought was edible for the night, it was a lot harder than I expected. I needed to come up with different meals not once, but three times a day.
I began asking my mom and older sisters to start sending me recipes that were very easy to make. I started with making simple pasta dishes that involved pesto sauces, red sauces, and some cheese sauces. I found that chicken was easy to make if you cut it into smaller pieces and threw it in a pan with seasonings. I also learned sandwiches and different types of toasts were simple as well.
However, after a while, I started to get tired of making meals all the time. When schoolwork started ramping up and I took on an internship, I began getting home later and had little time to cook meals. This was when I learned about Trader Joe’s frozen food section.
My sisters, who are both in the working world now, told me to go to Trader Joe's and walk through the aisles of frozen meals. They explained everything was easy to make and healthy considering it was a frozen meal. There are around ten meals that I rely on for different nights of the week when I don’t have the time or energy to put a meal together. Some of my favorite meals from Trader Joe’s include:
Cacio e Pepe
Mandarin orange chicken
Soup dumplings
Vegetable stir fry
Cauliflower gnocchi
Mini croissants
Pork gyoza potstickers
Any pizzas
Ricotta spinach-filled ravioli
BBQ teriyaki chicken
If you don’t feel like cooking a simple grocery store frozen meal is a great and accessible option. If you are looking for a home-cooked meal a Trader Joe’s frozen dinner will do the trick!
