Does anyone else find themselves sticking to simpler recipes just to avoid the hassle of logging?

GottaBurnEmAll

lemurcat12 wrote: »

I find it odd that casseroles (how many sites are there mocking the casseroles of the '50s-'70s) and meat pies (WAY old, like the Romans made them, and they are a feature of the shows I've watched about cooking in Elizabethan or Victorian times, etc.) are being promoted as newfangled cookery.

^This. I read cookbooks for fun. I used to buy old ones at flea markets because I enjoyed the peek into the past.

If you're all thinking recipes are just now complicated? That's only because your moms cooked simply, not because there weren't complicated recipes around "back then".

Moxie42

Most of my day-to-day meals are pretty simple (meat, sweet potato, veggies), but I go through phases where I love trying new recipes and batch cooking. I find plans on Pinterest for 7+ freezer-meal recipes (14+ two-person meals) that are all different but use similar ingredients, and it comes with a shopping list which makes it convenient, helps prevent waste, and minimizes unnecessary costs. I find trying new recipes fun so I'll dedicate half a day to prepping the meals and I'll go ahead and add them to the Recipe Builder on MFP. That way, I get all done at once and throughout the next two weeks, I only need to select the meal from My Recipes.

lauzjacobs

Meallime app has nutritional value page to manualy add. Hoping they will integrate to mfp shortly

shaumom

Absolutely I do this sometimes, especially on days I know are going to be more stressful.

Alatariel75

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

I find it odd that casseroles (how many sites are there mocking the casseroles of the '50s-'70s) and meat pies (WAY old, like the Romans made them, and they are a feature of the shows I've watched about cooking in Elizabethan or Victorian times, etc.) are being promoted as newfangled cookery.

^This. I read cookbooks for fun. I used to buy old ones at flea markets because I enjoyed the peek into the past.

If you're all thinking recipes are just now complicated? That's only because your moms cooked simply, not because there weren't complicated recipes around "back then".

Yup! My goodness, my grandma was the one who overcomplicated everything. I remember when I went to visit her, I'd been travelling for 3 weeks and so badly just wanted some veggies. I bought cauli and broccoli and was going to steam them with dinner. Right before dinner, she asked me to pop to the shop for something, and when I came back, my lovely veggies were a cauli/brocc creamy cheesey bake with a crunchy top. I legit almost cried.

Casseroles are old school, as are pies!

paperpudding

I must admit not having this issue at all - if it is too bothersome to log the exact recipe ingredients I just weigh the finished product and call it something similar from the data base.

Lazy aproximation, I know - but my goal has never been to have accurate logging. It has always been to log well enough to get results and this works for me.

Need2Exerc1se

Alatariel75 wrote: »

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

I find it odd that casseroles (how many sites are there mocking the casseroles of the '50s-'70s) and meat pies (WAY old, like the Romans made them, and they are a feature of the shows I've watched about cooking in Elizabethan or Victorian times, etc.) are being promoted as newfangled cookery.

^This. I read cookbooks for fun. I used to buy old ones at flea markets because I enjoyed the peek into the past.

If you're all thinking recipes are just now complicated? That's only because your moms cooked simply, not because there weren't complicated recipes around "back then".

Yup! My goodness, my grandma was the one who overcomplicated everything. I remember when I went to visit her, I'd been travelling for 3 weeks and so badly just wanted some veggies. I bought cauli and broccoli and was going to steam them with dinner. Right before dinner, she asked me to pop to the shop for something, and when I came back, my lovely veggies were a cauli/brocc creamy cheesey bake with a crunchy top. I legit almost cried.

Casseroles are old school, as are pies!

I make chicken pot pie semi-often. It's quite healthy. But I am sort of old(ish). I rarely do casseroles, unless lasagna counts.

fitoverfortymom

My hardest time with recipes is in the US, everything is rarely listed in grams, so it's kind of a mental process to both measure and weigh.

Prepping and measuring the ingredients before I begin cooking helps, rather than the prep-and-cook-as-I-go method that I used pre-weight loss.

I do tend to keep my cooking simple, mostly because we're a busy family. Dinners are typically a meat, a starch, and a veggie in various combinations with seasonings and some type of fat/oil to keep it all lubed up.

As we inch towards fall, there's definitely more soup/stew/slow cooker action happening. I have found that using slow cooker liners allow me to pull the entire contents of the cooked product out, weigh it, and replace it in the slow cooker for getting the portions I want. That way, when there's leftovers, I only have to weigh the finished product by gram to accurately account for it after dinner that night.

pmm3437

Has more to do with prep time and ease then logging, but yes, I tend to gravitate to simpler recipes with few ingredients.

dwilliamca

I don't mind logging at all and will save a list of ingredients as a meal when it is something I log frequently like a stew or soup (don't usually account for salt/spices). I use the recipe builder for large, complicated recipes, both my own and from the Internet. Sometimes import works/sometimes not. I think it is kind of a PITA. I have to check it carefully as I've had it pick totally unrelated items, it can't find lower calories foods I list even naming brands, and it has put in ridiculous quantities rather than what the recipe lists (especially if recipe is in cups and recipe builder tries to change to grams or ounces). Plus I do not like having to weigh it all to find out what a single serving is or guess. Anyway, I still do it because I like home cooked, tasty food, and I like variety and would rather not eat than eat the same simple thing meal after meal because I don't want to log. Besides I burn more calories making the complicated recipes that involve chopping and preparing.

Lean59man

toxikon wrote: »

This is just a light-hearted observation, wondering if anyone else can relate.

I love to cook and before calorie counting, I'd always add dashes of this and that, use lots of ingredients and adjust to taste as I went along.

Now - knowing I'll need to input the meal into my diary (or create the recipe) - I tend to seek out really simple recipes. When I come across a recipe that has 20+ ingredients, I groan and move along.

I'll only do a "complex" recipe if I know I'll be making a huge batch (like soup, for example), because then at least I'll only have to input it once.

Same here.

RoxieDawn

I have not really thought about this. I have 20 pages of recipes in the builder. I use the saved meals a lot too.

I alter recipes a lot to add more protein, more of less of other certain ingredients ..

I made a chicken pot pie with top crust Saturday, and making that is a pain but always worth it. When we decided to have that, the first thing I said was 'this is a pain to make'.. saved recipe just needed a tweak.

I make more chili's and roasts in the fall/winter, I made a huge pot of meatless spaghetti sauce yesterday to make several things like: with just pasta and/or meat balls, spaghetti bake/casserole, homemade pizza, take on chicken Parmesan, etc. and can freeze it too.

sgt1372

I prefer to cook simple dishes generally. Has nothing to do w/logging.

If a recipe has more than 4-5 ingredients or requires some esoteric food item, I'll generally avoid it simply because I don't want to cook things that are too complicated.

As for logging, when I first started using MFP, I was very scrupulous at creating recipes and logging my meals from them. But, now, I don't bother and just look for a pre-existing entry that looks close enough to whatcI'm cooking and just use it instead.

rankinsect

toxikon wrote: »

amusedmonkey wrote: »

I do find myself gravitating to recipes with fewer/simpler ingredients or recipes I already saved and know the calories for. Sometimes when something with many ingredients looks particularly enticing I go through the trouble of creating a recipe, but then it's there and is added to my recipe arsenal I have no trouble cooking it again if I wanted to.

Now this may sound excessive or obsessive, but I would rather do almost the exact weight of stuff in my recorded recipes when I prepare the same recipe again, so if something is larger I cut off parts until it's close enough in weight (any cut off parts go into whatever I'm cooking for the dog if it's a safe food, so I'm not wasting anything). It's just a quirk.

I kind of have the opposite quirk - I don't like wasting food, so my ingredient portions are always different even for the same recipe. If I buy an onion for a recipe, I'll use the whole thing.

So if I log a quiche recipe, then a month later, go make the 'same' quiche, I'll have to adjust all the ingredients again, so I end up just doing an entirely new recipe each time, hah.

There are lots of tricks to making it easier to log:

1. Know where you need to be precise and where you don't. A medium-sized onion is typically just under 50 calories. Just log it as 50 if you use a whole one. Even if you're off by 20%, that's only 10 calories, which is basically rounding error. On the other hand, butter is calorie dense and you should be precise about it.

2. Know what you can just omit entirely. A lot of herbs and spices have negligible calorie amounts, and even things like lettuce I rarely log, since I tend to eat under 10 calories in a serving.

3. When I do imprecise recipes that I like and will repeat, I often just make it a couple times and take the average. After that, I log everything else as if it was that average value. As long as you don't try to cheat yourself with this, it works great. If I did do substitutions, I'd just calculate out the difference starting from the average value.

81Katz

Sometimes. My meals (mostly dinner) are pretty much a rotation of the same meals.
A couple times that I've made chili I didn't bother to make a recipe or log it just because it has so many ingredients and I have no patience for that, same with my homemade pasta sauce.

KANGOOJUMPS

love love to cook

toxikon

rankinsect wrote: »

toxikon wrote: »

amusedmonkey wrote: »

I do find myself gravitating to recipes with fewer/simpler ingredients or recipes I already saved and know the calories for. Sometimes when something with many ingredients looks particularly enticing I go through the trouble of creating a recipe, but then it's there and is added to my recipe arsenal I have no trouble cooking it again if I wanted to.

Now this may sound excessive or obsessive, but I would rather do almost the exact weight of stuff in my recorded recipes when I prepare the same recipe again, so if something is larger I cut off parts until it's close enough in weight (any cut off parts go into whatever I'm cooking for the dog if it's a safe food, so I'm not wasting anything). It's just a quirk.

I kind of have the opposite quirk - I don't like wasting food, so my ingredient portions are always different even for the same recipe. If I buy an onion for a recipe, I'll use the whole thing.

So if I log a quiche recipe, then a month later, go make the 'same' quiche, I'll have to adjust all the ingredients again, so I end up just doing an entirely new recipe each time, hah.

There are lots of tricks to making it easier to log:

1. Know where you need to be precise and where you don't. A medium-sized onion is typically just under 50 calories. Just log it as 50 if you use a whole one. Even if you're off by 20%, that's only 10 calories, which is basically rounding error. On the other hand, butter is calorie dense and you should be precise about it.

2. Know what you can just omit entirely. A lot of herbs and spices have negligible calorie amounts, and even things like lettuce I rarely log, since I tend to eat under 10 calories in a serving.

3. When I do imprecise recipes that I like and will repeat, I often just make it a couple times and take the average. After that, I log everything else as if it was that average value. As long as you don't try to cheat yourself with this, it works great. If I did do substitutions, I'd just calculate out the difference starting from the average value.

I've been using MFP on and off since... maybe... 2011? Haha, I know all the tips and tricks, don't worry. I don't ever bother logging spices, salts, SF-sweeteners and sometimes particularly low-cal vegetables.

leggup

I don't bother logging condiments/herbs under 5 calories. Lemon juice, basil, garlic... I have a large enough deficit planned that I don't have to worry about 2-15 calories uncounted.

That said, "a little of this, a little of that"-type skillet meals are how my portions got out of control. I would start with something, then add 2 eggs, some cheese, some fake sausage ... and on and on, nibbling on cheese while i cooked.

CTcutie

If I'm looking for a recipe (a former daily hobby, now almost a vague memory, lol): Now I look specifically for recipes that include the nutritional info so at least I know what I'm in for before I sit down & enter everything (and then change it to fit what I want it to be!).

Yeah, I can make a baked chicken breast and steamed broccoli and have a salad of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots... but no thanks. Life's too short

When I get lazy I eat cereal, eggs, simple sandwich, or a protein shake.

Recipes: the internet has revolutionized the sharing & creation of them. I think it's great.

jamespatten3576

guilty

grinning_chick

Nope. I cook solely from recipes, sometimes with tweaks/combinations, but from recipes. Tons from Cooks Illustrated, if you want to talk about "complicated" recipes ingredient list length-wise. And not a single one with the nutritional info already worked out for it so I am having to do it every time.

I'll even one up you. Not only do I just suck it up and create a "recipe" for something I want to eat and so cook, I end up doing all the individual ingredients macros entries as well to use in the recipe since so many ingredient entries are not just wrong, but obscenely so, regardless of what database one consults. So I have my own private database that grows every time I cook.

Sure, it makes inputting future recipes easy, but it is a PITA nonetheless. Part and parcel is how I think of it and move on.

Fyreside

I'm with @grinning_chick I love to make things from scratch So I will cook the most complex recipe's and go to the trouble of working out the nutritional data a accurately as I can, even developing my own spreadsheet to make it easier. the thing I like about a recipe, other than repeatable results, is you only have to work out the numbers once. Then confidently log what you know them to be.

lemurcat12

Cooking from scratch need not be the same thing as cooking from recipes, however. As I said above, I almost always cook from scratch, but never from recipes -- I read cookbooks and get ideas, but dislike following a recipe unless I'm baking. I tend to look at what I have on hand, what I'm in the mood for, and wing it. (I might end up with a recipe after the fact from the notes I take to log when cooking, however.)

AnnPT77

Not at all.

I'm not a big recipe person, but I routinely scratch cook things with many ingredients.

Between putting individual ingredients in a pot on the scale (zeroing between), weighing the jar and using the minus when I dip some out, and putting the cutting board on the scale before pushing an ingredient into the dish, it's seconds. Note on junk mail envelope to record once hands are clean.

I think I actually cook more often from scratch, and use more ingredients, now that I'm in MFP-world. I'm enjoying food, cooking and eating so much more, now that it's thoughtful and selective - really savoring what I eat - compared to just mindlessly shoveling in whatever happened to be on hand.

JaydedMiss

iv neever liked makign huge recipes but that may be because i have a fridge that doesnt work very well. Always gravitated towards the delicious basics. Easy logging is a bonus

cat_lady77

Sometimes yes haha. That barcode scanner does not help! It is pretty easy to manually enter recipes though, so I've been doing my best at that. Plus you can name it whatever you like, so there's a chance for creativity! Yesterday I threw a bunch of stuff in the crock pot & the only thing I had to weigh was the chicken.