Best way to estimate Calorie & Nutritional Info for Home Made Meals ?

Cody94549

OK, so without getting all A-R about counting, how do you make a basic measurement of the nutritional info casseroles etc that are homemade? Do you actually : Count the weight & info for each and every item that goes into it, then divide by the number of servings? It can get very tedious if a lot of ingredients go into something, right?

minizebu

MFP has a recipe builder tool. You can enter all the ingredients into the recipe builder and then, yes, this tool will divide by the number of servings and generate the nutrition for an individual serving. It is a little tedious, but if this is a meal that you prepare fairly frequently, then you only have to enter it once and from that point you can use it repeatedly, or tweak it as necessary, if you make changes.

NikiChicken

I use the recipe builder tool. You only have to put the recipe in once and then it's there every time you make that meal, but yes, the first time you make a recipe you do have to weigh and measure everything that goes into it and enter it into the recipe builder.

PeachyPlum

The Recipe Builder tool is a lifesaver!

And if you're using a recipe that's available on the internet, you can just copy/paste the URL and it will import all the ingredients for you as well.

With the recipe builder, the key is just to go back through and make sure it picked the best match for ingredients and understood the quantities correctly. I made something the other day and it told me my recipe was like four million calories per serving.

Turned out it mistook a can of Bush's Black Beans for a can of Southern Style Seasoned Black Beans (which is full of fat and bacon), and it mistook my entry of 250g of quinoa for 250 packages of quinoa.

icemaiden37

PeachyPlum wrote: »

The Recipe Builder tool is a lifesaver!

And if you're using a recipe that's available on the internet, you can just copy/paste the URL and it will import all the ingredients for you as well.

With the recipe builder, the key is just to go back through and make sure it picked the best match for ingredients and understood the quantities correctly. I made something the other day and it told me my recipe was like four million calories per serving.

Turned out it mistook a can of Bush's Black Beans for a can of Southern Style Seasoned Black Beans (which is full of fat and bacon), and it mistook my entry of 250g of quinoa for 250 packages of quinoa.

Wow - I didn't know that. What a clever feature! Thanks. (Love the quinoa story, btw!)

Cody94549

Thanks to all of you ... I will use that tool.