How I Meal Plan During the Busy Teenage Season

Meal planning with teenagers means juggling busy schedules, late nights, and everyone eating at different times. Here’s my current strategy.

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting in bed with a cup of tea, planning out the week’s meals and getting my shopping list done. I thought I’d take a moment to share how I’m currently doing our meal plans.

I was 28 years old with no kids when I first started this blog. 17 years on, and I’m currently a parent of teens – one who has a job and who is old enough to learn to drive. A lot has changed since the first years of this website, and the way I meal plan has also adjusted. 

However, the one thing that has remained constant is the planning itself. I rely on meal planning to reduce – or at least contain – the mental load of feeding a family 365 days a year.

Meal planning makes my life feel a little easier.

With busy teens come busy schedules. At least one person is out of the house each night, whether that’s for work, school activities, extra-curricular activities, or socialising. 

This means that sitting down to eat as a family is becoming less frequent, and juggling hot meals for everyone is more work.

(Also, we don’t own a microwave, but I’m quickly reconsidering.)

So this is how I’m currently meal planning to get the best of both worlds – hot, tasty meals for everyone that aren’t a dry, reheated mess, but at the same time not making extra work for myself. 

Because I really don’t want to be cooking multiple meals a night if I can help it.

Meal Planning with Categories

I’ve written about how I use meal planning categories in the past with a rotating meal plan. In the past, I’ve based my categories on types of food. For example, pasta night, chicken night, and vegetarian night.

At the moment, I’m basing my categories around our schedules (and by ‘our’ I mean our kids). These are:

• Keep-warm Monday
• Slow-cooker Tuesday
• Oven-easy Wednesday
• Throw-together Thursday
• (Hubby cooks Friday & Saturday – whoohoo)
• Sit-down Sunday

(I just made the names up on the spot for this blog article, but I kinda like them.)

Keep-Warm Monday

On this night, I cook meals that can be either reheated or kept warm without turning yuck.

Things like curries, stews, savoury mince, some saucy pasta dishes, and some stir-fries. 

Some ideas include:

• Thai curry
• Savoury mince
• Veggie curry
• Moroccan chicken
• Sausage and bean stew
• One-pot mince and potatoes
• Chilli beef
• Ratatouille

Slow-Cooker Tuesday

I work from home, so it’s easy for me to put the slow cooker on during the day. It’s harder if you don’t work from home, although it’s still viable if you’re ok with leaving it on all day unsupervised or you have a window in the afternoon to do a dump-and-cook recipe on high for 3-4 hours. 

Slow-cooker foods are great if you’re spending all evening taxiing kids around to their activities. Because you can still come home to a hot meal. 

They’re also great if everyone is coming home at different times. I use the ‘keep warm’ function, so that everyone can grab a bowl when they walk in the door. 

Just as above, you can serve warm rice or quick-steamed veg as a side. 

Ideas include:

• Paprika pork
• Slow cooker lamb stew
• Slow cooker pumpkin soup
• Slow cooker pea and ham soup

Oven-Easy Wednesdays

On Wednesdays, one child returns home quite late, so I do some kind of oven bake that I can pop back in the oven on low about half an hour before they come home so that it’s warm for them.

I don’t keep it in there all night; it would dry out. Covering it during reheating also helps it not to dry out.

Ideas include:

• Leftover pork enchiladas
• Tuna casserole
• Mince bake
• Baked meatballs
• Chicken and veg tray bake
• Apricot Chicken
• Pie and salad or pie, chips, and mushy peas

Throw-Together Thursdays

Thursdays are for meals that can be cooked super quickly and assembled. I’ve written before how we use our sandwich press to cook things other than sandwiches – well, Thursday is the night it gets a workout.

For example, for a protein and rice bowl, I’ll make rice in the rice cooker and keep it warm, pre-cut salad like carrot and cucumber, maybe pre-steam some broccoli. If we’re doing chicken, I (or the kids) use the sandwich press to cook chicken or schnitzel in about 2 minutes to add – sliced – to the bowl. Drizzle with your favourite sauces, maybe add some crispy onion or pickled ginger, and everyone can throw together their own chicken (or other protein) and rice bowl in moments.

Apart from a protein and rice bowl, some throw-together meals we make include:

• Nachos
• Quick burritos
• Tacos
• Chicken or fish wraps (cooked on the sandwich press)
• Quick souvlaki (not with lamb atm, because it’s so expensive)
• Loaded fries
• Toasties
• DIY pizza

Sit-Down Sundays

Sunday night is the only night that we can almost guarantee that everyone is home for dinner. So this is the night I cook foods that are better eaten straight away, like a Sunday roast. 

Super Speedy Sides for Busy Nights – On the table in 2 Minutes

Salads – either bagged salad or one you’ve made ahead of time and stored in the fridge – make fast, nutritious sides to many meals.

Quick-steamed microwave vegetables also make nutritious and fast sides – either the pre-made individual servings, or just frozen veg you throw together yourself (to make up a single serve). If, like us, you don’t have a microwave, you can steam them on the stovetop; it just takes longer. Speed the process up by boiling water in the kettle first.

Many rice cookers have a ‘keep warm’ setting, so you could have curry in the slow cooker and rice in the rice cooker, and maybe some cucumber on the side for a hot meal in moments. Alternatively, you could use microwave rice OR reheat cooked rice in either the microwave or with boiling water. I freeze cooked rice for quick meals. It’s not quite as good as fresh rice, but it’s fine for busy nights.

Bread or chips are great carb alternatives that are super quick and easy to put on the table. Think crusty bread with stews, naan or roti with curries, corn chips with chilli, potato chips (crisps) as a side, or just toast and butter with savoury mince.

Meal Planning Across a School Term

Because things slow down significantly in the school holidays, and because the kids are old and capable enough to cook a meal or two themselves, my planning is quite different and more spontaneous than it is during the term.

There are 10 school weeks in each school term where we live. That means I need 10 slow cooker meals, 10 easy meals, 10 oven-bake meals, etc. 

I could do 5 of each and rotate them more, but I do get bored cooking the same things all the time, which is why I pick ten and why I’m currently working my way through the two recipe books below.

At the beginning of the term, I wrote a list of 10 meals in each category, using my own recipes and new recipes (again, currently from the two books below). 

Each week, I plug in one recipe from each category into the corresponding day, using each recipe only once across the term – takes about 2 minutes.

Then I double-check the ingredients and add them to my grocery order along with the other groceries we’ll need for the week. This takes about 10 minutes.

Meal planning is done in minutes, usually as part of my Sunday morning weekly review and planning session.

Recipe Inspiration

There are, of course, a bazillion recipes across the internet, including on this site, but there are two books I’ve been making recipes out of this year. They include:

• The Batch Lady (Amazon link)
• Bored of Lunch (Slow cooker recipes – nothing to do with lunch. Amazon link)

Both are British books and have a lot of recipes that we’re experimenting with. I used smoked sausage for the first time and found it delicious, so it went onto our family favourites list. I do find that some recipes we have to tone down – the flavours can be a bit overwhelming.

I would also love to use my freezer more like the Batch Lady recommends, but we just don’t have the room in our tiny box freezer.

Tools and Techniques that Make Dinners Easier

I’ve never had a microwave – no real reason why – but I’m thinking of getting one. 

Although I have to say, when I was a teen working late, I would come home to a plate in the microwave and…nuked cooked meat and three veg? Yeah, nah, it’s not great.

That’s why I’ve leaned heavily into the above alternatives. 

So these are the kitchen appliances we rely on instead.

• A basic slow cooker (Amazon link. You could use a multi-cooker instead for better value)
• A basic rice cooker (Amazon link)
• A sandwich press (Amazon link)

A kettle is handy to quickly boil water for steamed veg or pasta if you don’t have a microwave, and of course, the oven is good to keep things warm.

That’s my current meal planning strategy for this season of life. It won’t last forever – I’m sure it will change many times. But for the moment, it revolves around easy meals and reheatable meals for teens with busy schedules.

Free School Term Meal Planning Printables

When I meal plan, I like to put each night’s commitment beside each meal for easy reference. While I usually write it out in a notebook, everyone else in the family always complains that they can’t find the plan, so having it stuck on the fridge is a better system.

To that end, I’ve created a template, and I’m sharing it for free, no sign-up needed (but if you’d like to join the newsletter so you don’t miss future articles, you’re more than welcome).

The following templates are in PDF format, best printed in A4. One is a simple black-and-white print-friendly version, and the other has some colour. Click the images to download.

What’s your current meal planning strategy? If you’ve been through this stage, what were your strategies to feed busy teens and juggle a multitude of busy schedules?