Need help documenting meals

msora27

I tend to cook in large quantities and eat it throughout the week.Does anyone know the best way to document prepared meals accurately?

Barbs2222

I've been thinking about this a lot because I just got a food scale. I think you have to write down all ingredients calories then weigh it. Figure it out to the gram then weigh your own portion. That is guess though. I was thinking about making lasagna, and then I'm all like wait, the cheese is way more in the middle it has to have more calories. Then I thought, ok, quarter it up and then the calories of my quarter will work themselves out over days. I don't know, I might be over thinking it. Hopefully someone more experienced will post because I've been wanting to ask this myself.

kcd1961

Use the recipe function. Unfortunately you cant set a per gram calculation, so include the "normal" serving size in the name i.e. Seafood Pasta "140g" It helps if you weigh the final container before you cook, then weigh the lot after and subtract the container weight. That will get you in the ball park.

Barbs2222

Plus make sure to weight the container so you can subtract that from the final outcome of calories for the meals. Like the above poster said you can use the recipe function but please for the love of god, don't put the recipe in the main data base. We have too many pages of people's personnel recipes to sort through now. Oh sorry above poster I see you addressed the container weight that I forgot

katcourt

I use the recipe function. I add all ingredients and then do the math to figure out how many servings/nutritional info per serving. If it's a soup, I measure out how many cups it made so I will know how many servings for calculations. I always divide it up before I serve my family so I can get accurate calories per serving. I use this for recipes I plan to make a regularly because logging is a breeze once you store as a recipe. Good luck!

4sharongee

how do you use the recipe function?

eileensofianmushinfine

go to the Food Tab, then Recipes, then the box on the right asks for you to put in a new recipe. Once you click on that, it will let you put in each ingredient and its amount -- and then tell how many servings it makes. I have a meal that I make during the week -- and it makes enough for me to have lunches all week long. Once you name the meal, you can just keep choosing that from the list. I hope this helps.

sugaraddict4321

Barbs2222 wrote: »

...I was thinking about making lasagna, and then I'm all like wait, the cheese is way more in the middle it has to have more calories. Then I thought, ok, quarter it up and then the calories of my quarter will work themselves out over days. I don't know, I might be over thinking it. Hopefully someone more experienced will post because I've been wanting to ask this myself.

Yup, way overthinking it. You just want to be in the ballpark, and if you're making a whole recipe and then eating it over a few days, the calories will even out.

I have two methods. My main one is this - add up all the ingredients in gram weights (raw). Whatever that total is, I divide by 100 - as in 100 gram portions. That's how many servings the recipe makes. Then when I go to eat it, I just weigh whatever I portion out. So a 250 gram portion would be 2.5 servings. As kcd says, I put the 100 g in my recipe name so it's easy. Also I don't flip out over tiny details from one batch to the next. Maybe this time my stuffed peppers have more beef and less tomato. So what. It's pretty close from one time to the next, and I try to keep the proportions similar. Yes, the raw ingredients probably weigh more than the finished product due to water loss from evaporation. Doesn't bother me.

My second method is to weigh all the raw ingredients in grams, and then divide by how many of an item I'll get. This works best for things like cupcakes and cookies, where you usually get a dozen or 3 dozen, for example. In my recipe title, I might say something like "per cupcake, about 30 g." Does every single cupcake weigh 30 grams? Probably not. Do I care? Nope cuz cupcakes are yummy and I'm eating them all anyway.