Cooking without recipes!!! How am I supposed to track calories?

vloach

How am I supposed to calculate everything for homemade recipes when I don't stop to measure everything??

I am a trained chef, and I RARELY use recipes, so to start doing that would ruin the relaxing pleasure I get from cooking and I don't want to lose that.

Any ideas?

jgnatca

Put the bowl on the scale. Tare it. Add an ingredient. Tare it. etc.

Annoying, I agree.

Or you "wing it" and find a "close recipe", close your eyes and tap your heels together, and put in a "guesstimate".

I find creativity by reducing the calorie count by watching the fats and cheese added. I know I'm eating good stuff even if I'm not accurately counting it.

Kalikel

I'm not a trained chef, so you're probably better at guessing than I am, lol. It really does take a lot of the fun out.

You can set up a sort of a mise en place and weigh each ingredient you will be using, then weigh what you have left (what you didn't use) when you're done. That'll tell you how much you used. It's a big pain, I know.

I chop my onion, weigh the bits, then weigh what is leftover (which is usually nothing because there just can't be too much onion for me.) I do this for all the ingredients. Then I enter it as a recipe. I don't weigh garlic because you have to draw the line somewhere, lol.

When I make peanut butter, it's the worst. I drizzle the honey in until it looks right, so I have to dump out a bunch of honey,weigh it, then weigh the remainder and rerun it to the jar. Such a major PIA!

It's a pain in the butt, no way around it. Taste the soup...needs more peas, toss them in, OOPS! Forgot to weigh the extra peas! It happens. Then you have to guess what the extra peas weighed.

If you don't want to weigh or measure at all, then you just need to cut back your intake until you start losing.

If you do want to weigh and measure, take heart. It seems less annoying as you go.

Anonycatgirl

Sometimes I measure and write down everything (except the spices--they're negligible.) Sometimes I say screw it and just make the meal, call that one a best guess, and be extra careful on whatever else I eat that day.

Queenmunchy

I often put the pot or skillet onto the scale with a pot holder and tare, add in one ingredient, tare, etc.

pumpkinpocalypse

I often make up recipes of my own as well since i cook a lot lot lot (pretty much a different dish every day), so what I do, also because it helps me not forget ingredients i wanted to use, is that i plan my whole dish ahead, writing down every ingredient i wish to use and the quantity in the form of a list. You set the quantities right ahead according to both how much you think you'll need AND the calorie content (like let's say you don't wanna eat more than 200 calories of pasta, well then you calculate how much is that 200 cals of pasta and you stick to it). So you get a general idea of how caloric your meal will be. For stuff like oil, where you,re sometimes more likely to add more and more as you go, just overestimate in the worst case.
So it's the best of both worlds! You get to decide in advance how many calories you get in your meal AND you are a lot more organized in your cooking, making things easier/faster, to do everything without having to think too much- did i forget this ? that? blahhh

sdraper2014

Most of my cooking is like yours. The meals I make most often and are staples I choose to measure and weigh until it tastes right to me. Then I can log my recipe and when I make it in the future I use the measurements. I know it will taste right, and I don't have much reason to deviate.

If you are really worried about it and like to change things up a lot, record the weights of all your food containers before cooking and after cooking and do the math to figure out what you used. Weigh your pan before you start cooking and after you are done cooking. Subtract the weight of the pan from the total and divide your portions how you like and log it that way. It is a pain in the butt, hence why I created my own recipes to follow and just log deviation separately.

iWillGetCrowSomeday

I rarely use recipes (except for baking) and don't understand what's difficult about measuring how much of an ingredient you are using and logging it. Isn't that how MFP is supposed to work? How did you plan to track calories without knowing how much of an ingredient you were using?

lemurcat12

I weigh ingredients when chopping or just before tossing them into the pan, take a note, and then log when it's finished. I actually find this about a million times less tedious than creating a recipe or copying some existing one (which I never use either). I don't find this way of doing it to be burdensome even when doing more complicated dishes, although I do tend to be a relatively simple cook most of the time.