If You Give a Kid a Cooking Challenge: 12 Easy Recipes for College Students

My oldest son Aidyn moved off campus this semester. As a college freshman, he had the convenience of eating either at the cafeteria or at one of the many on-campus restaurants through his college meal plan. This summer, my goal was to teach him a few simple recipes that he could make for himself without spending a lot of time in the kitchen. 

Easy Recipes for College Students

We are sharing these recipes because they are serving a specific purpose: to teach a young adult basic kitchen skills while also making sure he can feed himself at college without eating at a fast-food restaurant for every meal. And these types of recipes may be helpful to other young adults too! 

How it started . . .

What does that mean? It means that a lot of the recipes use canned or frozen vegetables, canned soup, quick rice, etc., to get a simple meal on the table quickly.

These recipes aren’t for seasoned cooks. They’re for beginners and specifically include shortcuts for a kiddo who just learned how to cut an onion. But, if you’re looking for some new ideas for recipes that you can make for a quick weeknight dinner, then these recipes might be for you too!

How it's going . . . 

This is the same kiddo who started baking cakes for charity when he was in middle school as a volunteer activity. So does he already know how to read a recipe? Yes! How to make desserts? Also yes! He just needed a little direction to move into making a full-blown meal for himself. And I’m super proud of what we accomplished this summer.

What Basic Kitchen Skills Should a College Student Know?

These recipes will give you the opportunity to review simple cooking skills. And while they may seem very basic to you, they may seem daunting to a teen or young adult who has never tried them before. Once your kiddo has mastered these skills, they can move on to more complicated recipes later in life.

• Boiling vs. simmering
• Browning ground meat
• Chopping vegetables
• Cracking eggs
• Ingredient substitutions (listed with recipes, if applicable)
• Marinating meat
• Measuring ingredients
• Preheating an oven
• Reading and following a recipe
• Sauteing vegetables
• Setting a timer
• Using a crockpot
• And more!

Making Loaf Pan Lasagna

What Types of Recipes Are Included in This Cooking Challenge?

This Cooking Challenge includes three recipe categories: crockpot recipes, casserole recipes, and one pot recipes. Each category includes four easy-to-make recipes that have quick prep times and have a minimal number of ingredients (minus pantry staples like oil and spices). And they all provide enough leftovers for one person to have a few extra meals or to share with roommates and friends. At the end of the Cooking Challenge, he had 12 recipes under his belt that he can rotate through for the school year:

If You Give a Kid a Crockpot (Dump and Go Dinners)

• Pizza Fondue
• Crockpot BBQ Chicken
• 15 Bean Soup
• Crockpot Pineapple Teriyaki Chicken

If You Give a Kid a Casserole Dish (Classic Comfort Food)

• Loaf Pan Lasagna
• Chicken Cobbler
• No Peek Chicken & Rice Casserole
• Upside-Down Pizza Casserole

If You Give a Kid a Cooking Pot (One Pot Meals)

• One Pot Taco Soup
• One Pot Chicken and Dumplings
• One Pot Easy Two-Bean Chili
• One Pot Taco Pasta

Making One Pot Chicken and Dumplings

Join The Harris Sisters Cooking Challenge for College Students

We'd love for you and your college student to join us on this Cooking Challenge. Together, let’s teach your college student the basic kitchen skills they need, so they can enjoy cooking for themselves. It’s not just about meals. It’s about giving them a foundation to feel confident in the kitchen and to build lasting habits for a healthier lifestyle. Let’s make this journey a little easier, together.

Simply choose a recipe above to get started. Walk them through it once, and before you know it, they’ll be cooking that recipe on their own. It's that simple! 

Be sure to Pin this post so you can easily come back to the full recipe series. And when they finish their first dish? We’d love to hear how it went. Those first kitchen wins are worth celebrating!

Get Cooking with Mealime

Yall, I have discovered a game changing app/ Website for those of us who are shall-we-say "challenged" in the kitchen.  Or even those of you who struggle to come up with new meal ideas.  It's called Mealime, and it coins itself as the app for simple and healthy meal plans.  This app has literally converted me from someone who knew nothing in the kitchen to someone who is cooking up fabulous and healthy meals for my family every night.  I am so excited to fill my grocery cart with fresh produce and meats each week, and know that they will turn into yummy meals that we all enjoy!  Read on for lots more...

So, I discovered this app only after I had tried a couple of meal prep services.  You knows the ones- where you pick your meals for the week and the service then ships you pre-measured ingredients and full instructions for how to complete each meal.  I LOVE these plans.  They are so simple and the recipes are yummy and easy to complete.  However, the prices on some of these services is probably more than I would normally spend if I were just buying my own groceries.  And I have the time to grocery shop so that's not really an issue.  I just needed the step-by-step instructions and a great arsenal of recipe options.  Enter Mealime to the rescue!

I literally went from someone who had maybe two go-to meals to having a world of fun and new and different meal plans at my fingertips.  Oh, and these meal plans are an entire meal, not just a main dish or a side that leaves you wondering what to put with it.  It's all pre-planned out and the foods are so different and so good! Not only that, but this app prepares your entire grocery list for you, allowing you to edit it by removing items that you already have in your kitchen or by adding other items to your grocery list that may not be a part of the recipes you have chosen for the week.  So I can still add my coffee, milk, bread, and all the other usual stuff to the shopping list I created in my Mealime app.

So, here's how it works.  You log into the Mealime app, and it pulls up hundreds of recipes for you.  You can filter your results if you are looking for or avoiding specific types of foods.  Most recipes take between 30-40 minutes to complete from beginning to end.  And as someone who has tried lots of them over the past month or so, I can vouch that they are all really good. You can click on individual recipes to check them out but once you decide to add one (or more) to your meal plan for the coming week, you simply click on the button that says "Add to Meal Plan."  I usually do this at some point on Sunday afternoon.

Once I have all my meals added to my plan for the coming week, the app shows me all of my recipes in my meal plan for the week, as well as a complete grocery list.  I go through the grocery list and then take out items that I already have in my pantry, and add any other items I need to pick up while I'm at the store.  The grocery list in the Mealime app is sorted by produce, bakery, meats/ seafood, dairy/ cheese/ eggs, and so forth which keeps it super easy to navigate through your list while you are shopping.  You simply click on the items on your list to cross them off.  I typically do my grocery shopping on Monday each week.

Once I'm ready to prepare one of the meals, I pull my app back up, and click on that meal.  It provides step-by-step instructions on how to complete the recipe.  Mealime gets bonus points from me for making sure that all components of my meal finish cooking at the same time so everything is hot and ready to serve at the end of about 40 minutes.  Once I've finished making one of the meals, I can "favorite" it if I really liked it so I can come back to it again.  I also check it off in the app, that that meal is complete for the week, and it grays it out, showing only the other active meals remaining in my meal plan.

Here's a look at some of what I've been cooking up...

Shrimp Stirfry

Grilled Chicken with Mango and Red Pepper Salad

I'm so not kidding.  This app has changed my life!  And I'm sure my family is thankful for this little tool too.  :)  The basic app is free of charge to use.  However, there is an option to upgrade the service to Mealime Pro which unlocks a bunch of additional recipes and allows you to do things like make notes in the app about the recipes you made. Currently, the Pro service costs $5.99 per month or $49.99 for an annual subscription.  So far, I am doing great with just the free app.  There appear to be lots of new recipes added each time I use the app.  I might consider upgrading to Mealime Pro at some point, but for now, I'm cruising along just fine.

NY Strip with Homemade Mashed Potatoes and the BEST Wilted Spinach EVER

Caprese Salad

What else?  Let's see. You can customize your experience by choosing the types of food you like or things that you dislike.  For example, in my app I checked off things like capers, lamb, olives, and tofu for ingredients that I dislike.  I also selected a meal size of 2 servings, which I have found is more than a plenty for me and my husband with some left for our 4 year old to try things as well.  There is also an option for 4 serving meal sizes.  There is a support center and a ton of articles submitted by the online community (which are all housed in the app).  You can also email Mealime directly through the app with any questions you have.  But honestly, it is so easy to use that even a kitchen novice like me can figure it out.  So I will be willing to bet that most of you would find it super easy peasy too.

Strip Steak Fajitas on Lettuce Wraps with Homemade Guacamole

To find the Mealime app, just go to your App Store and download it to your device.  I actually put the app on my iPad first because I usually use the iPad in the kitchen to reference my recipes.  But I quickly figured out I needed the app on my phone too when I am at the grocery store to reference the grocery lists it creates for me.  As I said, the basic app is free, and totally where I would start with Mealime.  If you decide you love it as much as I do, you might consider upgrading to the Pro version down the road.  You can actually also access all your information, including your recipes, meal plans, grocery lists, and your preferences from Mealime.com.  So if you have a computer or laptop in your kitchen, you can use the website to get cooking too. I hope you will give this tool a try.  It's the best thing I've found lately, and I'm loving it.  

Honest Reviews: Home Chef

According to Dr. Seuss, "Unslumping yourself is not easily done!"  There is no place where this is truer than the kitchen.  Whether you are constantly chauffeuring your children all over town or you are just tired of the same old same old, mealtime can become downright tedious.

Recently, I learned about a new online meal delivery service that is making the rounds. (through my Facebook feed, anyway)  I decided to give it a whirl and ordered a few meals for my family.  There are several of the services out there.  I tried Home Chef.  Each week, on their website, they have a menu. You select how many servings you would like and which meals catch your fancy, and they do the rest. They ship you everything you need in a neat little box right to your doorstep.

So, this is what the contents of your box will look like:

Each meal is packaged separately, as well as any meat.  They also send a binder and recipe cards for each meal.

They only send just what you need to make the meals, so there is no waste.  You won't have herbs dying a slow death in your fridge while you think of new ways to insert them into some other meal, and you will be able to use some oddball ingredients that you may not be able to find at your local grocer. 

This meal service may not be your go to for every meal because it can be expensive.  However, if your family is small, it's a good option to have.  It would be a great present to your college kid, and it's also awesome for vacation.  I happened to remember it for our recent annual Girls' Weekend Trip to St. Simons Island, GA.

We usually rent a house with a kitchen.  By thinking ahead, and using HomeChef, I was able to just order what we wanted (including Vegetarian options) and bring the box with me, so we didn't have to hunt down a grocery store while we were there.

We just poured some wine and broke out the meals. 

It was practically painless!

....and did I mention healthy?

Just look at the finished products:

Be sure to check Home Chef out.  Let the unslumping begin!

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