How to divide a homemade meal into servings?

funkyspunky871

Okay, so, making spaghetti tonight. I'm wondering how do I divide this into servings. It seems quite impossible to do unless I go through the entire pot and measure how many cups are in it. Is there any other way?

I thought maybe I could add how many ounces everything is and divide by 8 to see how many cups there are. Like, if I was using a pound of ground turkey and 6 ounces of tomato paste and 10 ounces of onion and 8 ounces of diced tomatoes, that's around 40 ounces of sauce, right? So it'd be about 5 cups?


Does it work like that?

solrak1969

In your food log there is now a recipe section. There you can put in all of your ingredients and then enter the amount of servings. It gives you the value of each serving.

sara_m83

Have you used the "recipe" tool? This is what I do with my home prepared dishes and then divide by the number of serves I'll get out of it. For example, last night I made a pot of soup for dinner. I knew that it should reasonably make 4 servings. But it was my dinner, so I ate more than 1/4 of it and entered it into my diary as 1.5 serves of my recipe. Does that make sense?

funkyspunky871

I did use the recipe section, but that's not my question. If I put in 6 servings, how much is each serving? Like amount wise, not calories? How do I know if a servings is 1 cup or 1 - 1/2 cups, etc?

lilay

I just always measure it all for my piece of mind.

mamagooskie

I estimate......I measure out the pasta by itself. As for the sauce I can usually eyeball 4 or 6 1 cup servings and that's how I've been doing it.

recipe4success

I don't usually worry about it...i'll just figure out the calories for the entire recipe, and then divide by the number of servings it makes to determine my calorie info for the meal.

To determine how much it makes (i.e. how much a serving size is) probably the easiest is to weigh your portion size, and say if that was 1 of 6 portions, then you know the entire recipe made 6 x whatever the weight of your serving is...if that makes sense.

iRun4wine

I get what you're asking. I always kind of wondered if there was a better way to do it, too. Tonight, for example, I made guacamole. I knew that the entire recipe was just under 300 calories and that 1 serving (split the recipe in half) was just under 150 calories. But, here's a whole bowl of guacamole in front of me- how do I know exactly what is half? I put all of it into a different bowl, placed a clean bowl on the scale, zero'd it out, and then dumped all the guacamole into that bowl. Then, you know what the weight of the guacamole is and measure to divide it in half. It's a process, but that's the only way I know how to do it!

MFPfriend

bump.

I'm curious too- I've always had to measure out the whole thing (which is annoying, because my family makes soup in HUGE pots, so I end up measuring out, like, 35 1-cup servings.

kayemme

i sort of estimate it. when i make something, i know there are two of us that are going to eat it. then all i need to figure out is do we eat once, twice or three times from the pot?

for spaghetti sauce, as we really love to eat it, it usually yields 3 servings each or 6 total. that's using 1 large can of tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs, and vegetables.

if we're especially hungry, then i say 2 servings. sometimes it goes like that.

BlueLikeJazz

I think if you're going to measure by the ounces of what you put in, then you should probably measure it out in ounces, too, when you are giving yourself a serving if you want the cal. count to be accurate. Same goes if you're measuring by cups when you put it in, measure by cups when you dish it out. This all gets a bit more complicated, though, when you're making soups, pasta, rice, etc. where it soaks up water. When I make recipes all in one pot, I measure it out by cup as I'm transferring it into tupperware (since presumably you're going to end up putting the leftovers in tupperware anyways) and then consider each cup a serving size. Seems to be the easiest way to do it without having to second guess measurements and weights and all that.

Spaghetti should be pretty easy to enter in your diary as a few separate ingredients though, yah? Pasta, sauce, meat...

melodyg

I usually end up measuring it all out too. For example, for soups I will measure out a cup or 1.5 cup "serving" for each of us to eat, then ladle the "leftovers" into Tupperware.. it just looks like I'm being organized and putting away leftovers before eating, what I'm really doing is measuring what the recipe made! Fortunately, I only have to do it once for each new recipe (usually). (Measuring drives my husband nuts)

LadyBella1i

funkyspunky87 is trying to find out how to find the servings. The Recipe Tool you have to type in the servings, but how do you type in what you don't know? This is what funkyspunky87 is trying to find out.

MyM0wM0w

I would take a big bowl and a kitchen scale. Zero out the scale with the bowl ON it and pour all the sauce into the bowl Then you can divide it into ounces or cups. If it was for future meals (like for freezing) I would take lots of containers and pour a ladle full in each container by turn until it was dished out evenly.

Hope that made sense......

nxd10

Three ways to do it without weighing.

1) Put it in as one serving, figure out what fraction you ate and log that. You made one pot of spaghetti, ate 1/4 of it, and log .25 servings.

2) Look the pot, figures it should provide a certain number of reasonable size helpings, and put that in. One pot feeds four platefuls. You eat one plateful. Log one.

3) Look at the pot, figure out how many people it will feed, and put that in. It should feed four people. You enter that. You eat about half of that (1/8th the pot) and log .5.

For big recipes like a kettle of soup or stew that I'm freezing, I pour it into a half gallon measuring cup I have to get volume and go from there.

If you find you are wrong on servings, you can adjust it after the fact. I find I'm pretty spot on.

aimforpeace

I have this same problem. Spaghetti is a tricky one, but for anything a bit more solid in a pot I "cut" it into pie shaped portions. For example: when I cooke chilli I usually make 4 servings worth. When it is done I score it like a pie into 4 pieces, then scoop out the contents of each for one serving. I think it is a bit more accurate than guessing, but a heck of a lot less work than measuring the whole thing and dividing. (and I save myself a few dishes, which is important to me since I wash them all by hand)

Nefetete

Most of the time, I estimate the number of servings in a dish. Some are easier then other. As long as I use up all my ‘estimated’ servings I am ok. It all balances in the end.

VelociMama

I usually put spaghetti in a bowl (make sure to zero it correctly before you put the spaghetti in) and weigh it. Then I divide by the number of servings to get how much I should measure out for myself.

The Recipes tool is really helpful for this also, as mentioned above.

Crochetluvr

I either measure out cupfuls and count them or I weigh the entire meal and then divide that into the amount of ounces I want to eat.

babyblake11

4 servings = get 4 bowls. proceed to put one scoop of food into each of the bowls. then keep going until there is none left.

easy peasy lemon squeezy.
in the end it will all balance out, especially if its only you eating this meal over a couple of days. i doubt a slight under or over estimation is going to ruin your fat loss chances.

ChancyW

I always measure it out. Especially if I made a lot of something.