Meal Prep for Teenagers
School lunch ideas for high school students.
Top ten meal prep tips for teens and school lunch ideas for high school.
If you have teenagers in high school you know how busy their schedules can get. The kids have a lot of pressure on them these days, and I strongly believe that one of the best things we can do as parents to help get them through their demanding days is to make sure they get as much good nutrition as possible, and help them to get it in ways that are quick and easy for them to grab. Lunch for high school, as with lunch ideas for elementary school, needs to be healthy, portable, and easy to eat.
So this where meal prep for high school kids works great! If you can take a little time to get some healthy lunch options prepped for them, then they can just grab something homemade rather than resorting to junk food for their busy days. These ideas aren’t just for lunch - they often end up being dinners too. We’ve got long school days here, and we often have evening rehearsals, clubs, practices, scout meetings, and more - you know how it is!
I’ve got a list of things that I do to meal prep teens to have healthy foods that are easy for them to grab for breakfast and lunch, and sometimes even dinner.
Top ten ideas to make or keep on hand for easy meal prep for teenagers:
Muffins
Egg bites
Smoothie packs
Burritos
Sandwiches
Quesadillas
Sandwich fillings
Leftovers
Cut up fruit and veggies
Ramen cups
Let’s get into some of the details of these ideas!
Muffins:
I like to make big batches of muffins to keep on hand in the fridge and freezer. Muffins freeze great so it’s easy to have a supply of them in your freezer for quick breakfasts or lunch packing. I’ve got a great recipe for banana chocolate chip muffins that are a staple in our house - I’ve adapted this over the years to cram as much nutrition into a sweet treat as I possibly can. But you can also easily adapt any favorite muffin recipe to be more nutritious. Here are a few things you can try with any muffin recipe. I recommend you start by changing just one thing at a time and see how you like the results.
add extra eggs
swap out any water for milk
add in a little favorite protein powder - try to find one that is unflavored and unsweetened, or just plain whey powder works great.
use whole wheat flour instead of white flour
add in a little ground flax, wheat germ, oat bran, etc.
add nuts
try cutting the sugar down, or swapping some for a natural sweetener like honey or maple syrup
Egg Bites
As with the muffins, egg bites are great to make in big batches, and they also freeze great. I make several dozen of this recipe at a time and usually put about half in the fridge and half in the freezer. For freezing I like to put two at a time in little snack bags, so they can just grab one little bag and warm it up. Egg bites are very easy to customize too. My kids like bacon and spinach, but you can add basically any kind of extra protein or veggie you like, or you can make them plain which are delicious too.
Boiled Eggs
If your kids like boiled eggs they are awesome to have in the fridge. I have this little egg cooker which cooks the eggs perfectly every time and makes them easy to peel. You can go ahead and peel the eggs for them so they really can be a quick meal. You can also buy peeled boiled eggs in handy little packs at Costco if you really don’t want to cook them yourself.
Smoothie Packs
These make it so easy for my teens to make their smoothies in the morning. I use reusable silicone storage bags and I get big bags of mixed frozen fruit. I spend a few minutes every week or two quickly filling the bags for easy school day morning smoothies. It’s also a great way to use up fruits that are just getting borderline - I sometimes toss berries, pieces of banana, grapes, cut apples, etc. into a big bag in the freezer and then use that stash to make up the smoothie packs.
Each pack has about 2 loose cups of frozen fruit and a handful of greens. All they have to do is dump it in the bullet blender with a small can (or about 6-8 ounces) of juice (or milk, or nut milk) and a small carton of yogurt. I like to get the big pack of Chobani greek yogurts at Costco. This makes one big serving or two small/medium servings. Lately two of my girls have been sharing this in the morning along with either a muffin or a couple egg bites.
Tip: people ask how we wash the bags. So here’s what we do: after they make the smoothie, they give the blender cup a quick rinse and then fill it halfway with hot water and a squirt of soap and put the lid back on and put it back on the blender for a few seconds. This cleans the blender. Then they take that container of hot soapy water and dump it into the silicone bag and give that a good shake, and rinse. The whole process takes about 30 seconds and everything is clean and ready to use again.
Burritos
Burritos make a great lunch, they can be eaten quickly and are totally portable. I always keep a stack of bean burritos in the freezer. Once a month or so I make extra rice and black beans and I make up some simple burritos with rice, beans, salsa, and a little cheese. These freeze great and the kids either set one in the fridge the night before or pop it in the microwave in the morning. If you make your own beans they have so much flavor - you really have no idea how good black beans can taste if all you’ve ever had is canned.
You can also make breakfast burritos ahead and freeze them too. Fill them with scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheese, whatever you like.
Sandwiches
I’ve got a whole other post about how to make sandwiches ahead of time, and it’s such a timesaver when you do it. I still do this sometimes for my high schoolers as well. It doesn’t have to be a whole extra process either. If I’m making a sandwich for one of us at home for lunch, it takes only a couple minutes more to just make a few extra. You’ve already got all the stuff out, so slap together a few extra sandwiches and put them in sandwich boxes in the fridge, and then your teens can just grab one on their way out the door in the morning.
I’ve even seen where people freeze sandwiches - PB&Js actually freeze great. Or we sometimes keep a box of Uncrustables in our freezer.
And don’t forget about breakfast sandwiches too - it’s easy to batch make all kinds of egg sandwiches, add ham, sausage patties, cheese, or whatever else you like. They also are excellent for freezing.
These are my favorite boxes for packing sandwiches, as you can see in the pic below. I’ve got some of these that are still going strong after 10 years of use.
Quesadillas
As with sandwiches, when I make quesadillas for lunch at home I always make a lot extra. Quesadillas store and keep really well in the fridge for quite a few days, and I think they are one of the most perfect lunch foods you can make. And also as with sandwiches, I pack up a serving of quesadilla slices in a sandwich box and just leave them stacked in the fridge for the teens to grab.
Sandwich fillings
If you keep a supply of easy sandwich fixings ready to go, then even if there isn’t something already made it can really take just a couple minutes to throw together a quick sandwich. We always have peanut butter, jam, sandwich meats and cheese, and condiments for easy access in our fridge. But I also like to make up batches of things like tuna salad, chicken salad, egg salad for the week, so all the teenager has to do is put a scoop of that between two slices of bread or roll up in a tortilla for a quick wrap, and they are ready to go.
Leftovers
If you’ve followed me for any time you probably know that leftovers are a very important part of how I keep everyone fed around here. I always cook extra of every dinner, so we always have a supply of healthy homemade foods in our fridge that can just be reheated for breakfast or lunch.
One of my teens in particular prefers a hot lunch, so I got her a new insulated Thermos food jar for her lunch this year. I’m liking this one because it’s a bit bigger than the size we used when they were younger, it suits a teenage appetite better. To take hot foods for lunch you’ll want to do two important steps: 1) heat your food to a little hotter than you really want it for eating, and 2) preheat your food jar with boiling water. You can do these at the same time - fill that thermos with hot water while your food is microwaving, then dump the hot water out and pour the hot food in. It will lose a little heat over a few hours, but if it started out too hot then it should end up just right by lunch time.
I also do things like extra burgers on burger night, and extra pizza. Pizza is one of the world’s perfect foods and there’s hardly an easier lunch than grabbing a few slices of leftover pizza. And maybe my kids are weird but they love leftover burgers - when we have burger night I always make at least a half dozen extra and we go ahead and assemble them on buns with ketchup and mustard and bag them individually and my kids love to have these for breakfast or lunch.
Cut Fruit and Veggies
I don’t know about your kids - but my kids will devour fruit and veggies if they are cut up and prepped for them, but they will basically never go looking to cut up the fruit or veg themselves. I can all the fruit in the world sitting right in front of them and it won’t be touched if it’s whole, but if I take a few minutes to cut up the apples and carrots, trim the stems of strawberries, peel oranges, cut cucumbers, etc. then they will eat it. To me it’s worthwhile - I want my kids to eat those healthy snacks. So I like to keep containers, bowls, and bags of prepped fruit and veggies ready for them to eat. These GreenBoxes have some kind of magic embedded in them that makes them keep cut fruit and veggies fresh for so long. You can cut up a bunch on the weekend and have them ready to grab all week.
Ramen Cups and Tofu
This one isn’t as much about prepping but it’s just about buying the right items. There’s plenty of ramen options out there and while it may not be the healthiest food for every day, it’s a great one to have on hand when you are really in a rush but want something hot and filling.
We love this brand of instant ramen, it really is SO MUCH better than the usual cheaper ones, and I’ve found that buying it in the cups makes it really easy for the kids to do themselves. They either microwave it or boil the kettle and add boiling water. If you keep some tofu on hand, and even better if you prep that by cutting in little cubes and having it ready in a container in the fridge, then they can quickly make a hot meal with some protein. I also usually try to keep some plain cooked chicken in the fridge that’s easy to add to ramen for protein. One of mine likes this for breakfast, or sometimes she will make the ramen and tofu and put it in the Thermos jar to take for lunch. This brand of ramen is a bit more expensive but our Costco recently started carrying it for a much better price than our grocery store, or the price on Amazon is pretty good too but not quite as good as Costco.
Other snacks and things
Here’s a list of some other things that aren’t about prepping but that I try to keep on hand for grab-and-go or quick meals. We generally have a rule in our house that the individually packaged things are more for on the go and not really for eating at home. That stuff does get expensive and the quantity we would go through if they were eating the small packages for snacks every day at home would be insane, so I try to keep some individual packages so they have things they can grab and toss in their backpack for snacks at after school and evening activities, and some bigger quantities for at home.
Various kinds of protein bars and granola bars
Dried fruit and nuts, or packs of trail mix
Individual packaged cheeses - like Babybel
Packs of chips & crackers, or cheese & cracker sandwiches
Pouches of gatorade mix or other electrolytes that can be dumped in a water bottle for those hot days
That’s it!
There are so many ways you can make your teen’s lives a bit less stressful by helping them with meal prep. Or even better - get the teenagers involved in this prep on the weekends, to help stock the fridge and freezer with homemade items to make their busy weeks just a little easier.