Finding Home in the Kitchen (Avocado Caprese Salad Recipe)

Don’t let the restaurants and traveling fool you, I’m a home body at heart. Since I’ve been bouncing around for a while now (in Europe for 4 months, back home, then to a new job in a different state), home has been a real relative term. The one thing that I can do anywhere and make it feel like home is cook.

In Spain, my host mother cooked all my meals (amazing ones to be fair), but toward the end, all I could think about was when I’d get home and be in control of my food. At first, this meant Shake Shack and a hot date with the Chick’n Shack (the best thing on the menu and I WILL fight you on that). But soon, my thoughts turned to home-cooked meals. For most college kids, that means from their parents, but for me, it meant cooking for myself. Traveling away from home for that long, and then moving away to a new job comes with a lot of anxiety. But cooking, that’s just between me, the kitchen, and the food. It's set time where all I need to be doing is following a recipe and paying attention to the progress (maybe drinking a glass of wine, too.) It’s a self-made home anywhere I go.

The people I’m with help, too, of course. For this post I’ve included three meal plans, inspired by some of my favorite meals I’ve cooked and enjoyed alongside the people I love.

Family dinner: Chicken Piccata

This chicken piccata recipe is straight-forward and delicious. One of my first nights back home from Spain, we made it for a family dinner (including the friends that are nearly family), along with pasta, roasted Brussel's sprouts, and Parmesan asparagus.

Best friend dinner: Veggie Bowls with Chile Sauce

During college, one of my roommates enjoyed cooking nearly as much as I did. But when our schedules inevitably got busy, and we needed nutrients to make up for our behavior on the weekends, we'd fall back on vegetable rice bowls. A favorite combo of ours was roasted onions, bell peppers, black beans, and rice with chile sauce. This recipe for sheet-pan tostadas is a good jumping off point, but to make it like us, ditch the tostadas, serve the veggies over rice, and drizzle with lots of green chile sauce.

Boyfriend dinner: Lemon Chicken and Avocado Caprese Salad

My boyfriend's mom is an excellent cook, which means he has high standards for food, but he's clueless when it comes to cooking. Throughout college, I was his main source of home-cooked meals. This is one of his favorites: chicken breasts with lemon and a chopped avocado Caprese salad (see recipe card below).