Simple Meals Every Mom Should Teach Her Son Before College
If you’re anything like me, you’ve just found it easier to cook all of the meals yourself instead of teaching your kids to do it. Cut to the weeks leading up to your son leaving for college and you’re suddenly realizing he may have to survive on Doritos.
Luckily, there are some super simple meals every mom can teach her son before sending him off to college. He’ll be able to eat a little healthier, save money on food, and feel more confident in his ability to feed himself for the next four years.
More importantly, each of these meals will teach him a skill that he can use for the rest of his life. His future wife will thank you for it!
Five Skills to Teach First
First thing’s first, before you can learn to cook, you’ve got to learn a few basic skills. These are going to help him whether he’s making a grilled cheese in college or a beef Wellington to impress his future in laws.
Basic Knife Skills
Spend some time teaching your son to safely chop an onion. He doesn’t have to impress food critics with his cutting skills, but learning the proper way to hold a chef’s knife will go a long way in the kitchen.
Food Safety and Storing Leftovers
The number one thing I would teach any college student is how to know when meat is fully cooked.
I can’t tell you how many times I drove home the fact that there is no such thing as “medium raw chicken.”
Now is a great time to gift your son a digital meat thermometer.
I also taught my son to write the date on all of his food storage containers with a dry erase marker.
It’s so important that they realize that leftovers don’t last forever! No one wants to study with food poisoning!
Grocery Shopping on a Budget
We have always taught our kids the value of a dollar, but it doesn’t hit home until they are doing all of their own grocery shopping at college.
Teach your son to look at unit price when comparing prices, and how to substitute common ingredients when something is just too expensive.
Seasoning to Taste
My husband taught our kids to follow recipes to the letter.
I, on the other hand, am teaching them to taste their food as they go and season to their own taste preferences.
It’s a huge waste of money to make a whole meal only to realize it’s too spicy or too salty to eat!
Clean As You Go!
College students aren’t exactly known to be tidy.
I’m teaching my son to just clean up as he cooks.
Once you have to scrub a pan that has been sitting in the sink for days, you realize how much easier it is to just rinse that same pan as soon as you’re done with it.
Your son may have to learn this lesson the hard way like mine did, but they’ll get there!
Teaching them to put away ingredients as soon as they’re done with them and rinse dirty utensils as they go will go a long way in keeping your son’s dorm room clean!
10 Meals I Taught My Son to Make!
Scrambled Eggs or an Omelet
Eggs are usually super cheap and they cook fast.
They’re also pretty forgiving when you have the heat cranked up too high. This meal alone will teach your son to control the heat on the stove and to use some sort of fat in the pan to prevent sticking.
Once he’s comfortable making scrambled eggs, learning how to make an omelet is an easy next skill!
Plus, omelets are a great way to use up leftover ingredients in his fridge so they don’t go to waste.
Win-win!
Pasta with an Upgraded Jar Sauce
This is the ultimate budget meal!
Teach your son to boil pasta to perfection (I’m a fan of just past al dente), and how to turn boring pasta into a meal.
Adding ground meat if his budget allows and using a slightly better store-bought sauce can quickly turn simple pasta into a filling meal!
Knowing that you can throw together dinner (plus leftovers!) for just a few dollars is very confidence-building for anyone living on their own for the first time!
Sheet Pan Chicken and Vegetables
Now it’s time to learn to use the oven!
Sheet pan meals are perfect for college kids because they make clean up so easy!
Teaching your son to make sheet pan chicken and vegetables will help him to be more confident using the oven, and is great practice for checking the internal temperature of meat.
This is a great way to use up random vegetables he purchased at the store, switching up seasonings to keep his meals interesting, and even swapping out the meat based on what’s on sale.
Plus clean up is just a pan and maybe a cutting board.
Quesadillas
This has been a staple in my children’s lives forever, so it’s a familiar meal for them to cook on their own.
Quesadillas are fast, cheap, and very flexible!
They can add basically any cooked meat to a tortilla, throw on some cheese, and toss it in a fry pan to make a quick quesadilla.
We have always made cheese quesadillas in our home, but this is a great way to use up leftover taco meat, beans, peppers…anything in the fridge that’s about to go bad.
Another hack is to use scrambled eggs and any leftover meat to make quick breakfast quesadillas!
Stir-Fry with Rice
Stir-fry is one of those meals I love because it’s an excuse to use up whatever is hanging out in the back of the fridge before it goes bad.
You may be noticing a theme here. I’m a huge fan of using up leftovers instead of throwing away good food!
I taught my son how important it is to cut vegetables to roughly the same size to make sure everything cooks evenly…because no one wants a stir-fry with raw carrots and mushy broccoli.
Learning how to cook rice is a life skill in and of itself!
I taught both of my kids to always make way too much rice. If you’re already cooking it, you might as well make enough to turn it into another meal later in the week.
Add whatever meat is in the fridge (or skip the meat completely), throw in some vegetables and sauce, and dinner is done.
This is less of a recipe and more of a “use up what you’ve already got” skill, and I think that’s a very important thing to teach your son before sending him off to college!
Big-Batch Chili or Soup
Soups of all kinds are my love language and I have passed this on to my son.
One of the best things you can teach him before he heads off to college is that you can make a big batch of some meals and have food ready later in the week (or month if he’s got a freezer!)
A big pot of chili or soup can feed your son AND his roommates for very little money.
Learning to freeze several portions and LABEL them is an important skill.
It’s a real-life hack to skip spending way too much for take out on busy nights!
Tacos
This is THE MEAL your son needs to learn to cook if he plans to entertain friends!
Tacos are easy to make in large amounts, are customizable, and can feed him with leftovers later in the week.
If you teach your son to brown ground beef, pour in a packet of seasoning, and heat up tortillas, he can have a meal ready in just a few minutes…whether he’s feeding himself or the entire floor!
Loaded Baked Potatoes
Sometimes a busy night calls for a microwave meal that isn’t some super processed frozen dinner!
Especially if your son only has access to a microwave, learning to make loaded baked potatoes are a must!
Potatoes are cheap, toppings are endless, and they only take a few minutes in the microwave.
Teach your son to scrub a potato clean, poke it several times with a fork, and microwave it until it’s soft.
This is also sure to be a great lesson in not blindly trusting those handy buttons on the microwave.
Just because there’s a button labeled “potato” does NOT mean the microwave knows what’s best.
Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup
As a grown adult, this is still one of my favorite comfort foods.
Grilled cheese, tomato soup, and some saltine crackers are a must-learn meal for every college student.
There are sure to be some days that your son is questioning his decision to go away to college, is feeling homesick, or is just having a bad day.
Grilled cheese and tomato soup are the perfect comfort food for days like this!
Also take the time to teach your son some handy life hacks.
For example, did you know that if you don’t have any butter in the fridge, you can use mayonnaise to make an awesome grilled cheese?
I promise, you can hardly taste the difference!
Overnight Oats
We made these throughout my kids’ entire childhoods, so they are no stranger to overnight oats!
Overnight oats are a great lesson in making food that you don’t actually have to cook!
Oatmeal is cheap for a huge amount of it, and your son can add any toppings he likes.
Favorites of ours are peanut butter, chocolate chips, and maple syrup!
We always made ours in mason jars, but my son uses small plastic food storage containers.
Teach your son to make several containers at once and stick them in the fridge.
Learning to make each one slightly different is a great way to avoid food fatigue later in the week when he’s tired of eating the same thing every morning!
How to Actually Teach Him
I realize that all of this sounds great in theory, but actually teaching your son probably sounds like a far more daunting task.
We tackled this by cooking dinner together several nights a week all summer.
I highly recommend acting like a teenager and demanding a grilled cheese sandwich on a random Tuesday afternoon.
Have fun with it!
Teaching your son to cook can be such a bonding experience for the two of you.
If you make chicken for dinner, call your son into the kitchen to make sure it’s cooked properly.
Find little ways to work these cooking skills into your days, whether he admits it or not, your son will be so grateful for it when he is living on his own.
What You’re Actually Teaching Your Son
Teaching your son these ten quick meals is about making your son feel comfortable surviving on his own.
As bittersweet as it is, we are ultimately preparing our children to live without us.
Every skill you’ve taught your son to this point…to do laundry, to clean, to drive…has all been leading them toward independence.
While it may be so hard to realize they don’t need us in every way they used to, there is something pretty amazing about watching them do life on their own.
I promise, your son will call and text you for life advice so much more often than you’d think.
This isn’t the end of him needing you. Your role is just changing.
I think you’ll be surprised by how much you love this new chapter too!
