Does anyone else find themselves sticking to simpler recipes just to avoid the hassle of logging?
Options
Replies
-
I have a little notebook sized dry erase board that I keep in the kitchen for recipes like that. I jot it all down as I go and input the recipe during a cooking lull. That said, I'm not a fussy cook by preference anyway. I make fresh food most days but if it's not done in half an hour or at least hands off if it takes longer, I probably wouldn't have bothered anyway.5
-
yuppers. i gave up logging after idk, five or six months.0
-
No. I'm not much of a cook. Never was. Most of my recipes are: open the can, heat and eat.1
-
Not really. I leave a buffer of exercise calories on the table to account for a pinch of this or a dash of that added on the fly.
When I'm cooking a recipe, I have a notepad on the kitchen counter. I just jot down what I've weighed on the scale and then enter it into MFP when I get the time.
I settled on this half and half method of precision/laziness to keep sane. Trying to account for every single dash of everything was driving me crazy, but I needed something close enough to be good enough while still enjoying my food.4 -
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.
Don't want to be a spoil-sport, but as you said this is a light-hearted observation, I'll tell you what one of mt pet peeves are.
Too much of modern day eating is focused around elaborate recipes. I had a fairly simple upbringing in my parents house, and the simplicity has (mostly) continued now in my own home. I sometimes eat food in other people's homes as well, and the differences are apparent!!
Why did our grandparents' greens or vegetables evolve into today's salads with bacon, cheese, fruit, and oil in it?
Why did simple starchy foods become casseroles covered in cheese and dripping in oil?
Why does meat have to be done in a pie with pastry on top?
When I eat other people's lovely dishes, I usually guess the portion sizes when I come home to update my log, but sometimes I'm not even sure what I ate!!
I am soooo with you you on this. I love good food but recipes have gotten so complicated. Real food on its own tastes really good, but people have to add so much stuff that the real food takes on different flavors. I like real food on its own, just a little salt and pepper now and then. None of these drippy cheeses, sauces, foreign ingredients. Keep it simple.3 -
flippy1234 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.
Don't want to be a spoil-sport, but as you said this is a light-hearted observation, I'll tell you what one of mt pet peeves are.
Too much of modern day eating is focused around elaborate recipes. I had a fairly simple upbringing in my parents house, and the simplicity has (mostly) continued now in my own home. I sometimes eat food in other people's homes as well, and the differences are apparent!!
Why did our grandparents' greens or vegetables evolve into today's salads with bacon, cheese, fruit, and oil in it?
Why did simple starchy foods become casseroles covered in cheese and dripping in oil?
Why does meat have to be done in a pie with pastry on top?
When I eat other people's lovely dishes, I usually guess the portion sizes when I come home to update my log, but sometimes I'm not even sure what I ate!!
I am soooo with you you on this. I love good food but recipes have gotten so complicated. Real food on its own tastes really good, but people have to add so much stuff that the real food takes on different flavors. I like real food on its own, just a little salt and pepper now and then. None of these drippy cheeses, sauces, foreign ingredients. Keep it simple.
Oh I am the exact opposite. I love to combine foods for different textures and flavors. I love to try new foods and food combinations. I do agree that cheese is WAY over used in many recipes I see shared on social media, but there are so many wonderful flavors beyond cheese.2 -
flippy1234 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.
Don't want to be a spoil-sport, but as you said this is a light-hearted observation, I'll tell you what one of mt pet peeves are.
Too much of modern day eating is focused around elaborate recipes. I had a fairly simple upbringing in my parents house, and the simplicity has (mostly) continued now in my own home. I sometimes eat food in other people's homes as well, and the differences are apparent!!
Why did our grandparents' greens or vegetables evolve into today's salads with bacon, cheese, fruit, and oil in it?
Why did simple starchy foods become casseroles covered in cheese and dripping in oil?
Why does meat have to be done in a pie with pastry on top?
When I eat other people's lovely dishes, I usually guess the portion sizes when I come home to update my log, but sometimes I'm not even sure what I ate!!
I am soooo with you you on this. I love good food but recipes have gotten so complicated. Real food on its own tastes really good, but people have to add so much stuff that the real food takes on different flavors. I like real food on its own, just a little salt and pepper now and then. None of these drippy cheeses, sauces, foreign ingredients. Keep it simple.
I don't see a problem with more involved recipes. Most of my food is simple with very few ingredients, even my sandwiches involve bread + 1 or 2 ingredients and that's it, just simple foods I love and I'm used to eating, but I don't see drippy cheeses and pies as overly elaborate unnecessary things.
These things have their place and time. Some traditional recipes are even more elaborate than current day ones with extra steps and extended wait times (looking at you Kulich! One time was enough, leaving it to mom from now on). Sourdough bread starter takes weeks to make, and the bread itself involves more steps than normal sandwich bread, but the result is worth it. Ratatouille involves several ingredients cut and arranged carefully to look pretty, and it looks so pretty the extra effort is worth it.
I'll have my simple cucumber, garlic, and yogurt salad sometimes that takes 30 seconds to make, but there are times when olivier salad with its multi ingredients and long prep time is just the right thing to have.3 -
Yes! I'm just meat or veggies with a bottled sauce or seasoning now. Maybe cheese sprinkled on top. So many great YouTube or Pinterest recipes I want to try but I am oh so lazy. It was a big day in history for me just to put a salad in the recipe builder. Now I just buy the processed version of what I want.0
-
Logging is not a hassle, so when my wife asked me to make a pot of chili last night I just did. Logging everything into a recipe with precise calorie - per - gram values showed me that my 8.0 oz of chili left room for my ice cream dessert. And a cookie.
I did not account for the chili powder nor for the paprika.0 -
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.3
-
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".7 -
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.1
-
Meallime app has nutritional value page to manualy add. Hoping they will integrate to mfp shortly0
-
Absolutely I do this sometimes, especially on days I know are going to be more stressful.0
-
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!1 -
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.2 -
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.0 -
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.1 -
Has more to do with prep time and ease then logging, but yes, I tend to gravitate to simpler recipes with few ingredients.0
-
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.
0
Categories
- All Categories
- 1.4M Health, Wellness and Goals
- 391.4K Introduce Yourself
- 43.5K Getting Started
- 259.7K Health and Weight Loss
- 175.6K Food and Nutrition
- 47.3K Recipes
- 232.3K Fitness and Exercise
- 390 Sleep, Mindfulness and Overall Wellness
- 6.4K Goal: Maintaining Weight
- 8.5K Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
- 152.7K Motivation and Support
- 7.8K Challenges
- 1.3K Debate Club
- 96.3K Chit-Chat
- 2.5K Fun and Games
- 3.2K MyFitnessPal Information
- 22 News and Announcements
- 922 Feature Suggestions and Ideas
- 2.3K MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions