Under Add Food to Diary, what is the difference between...?

spacetreemonkey

...Meals and Recipes?

I put all the foods together for a meal I have a lot of, but the quantities of each ingrediant are different each time. Is there a way to select the meal/recipe so it generates a list of items in the recipe so I can change the portions each time?

Potentially, if there is, I can make meal/recipe lists under "drinks", "english breakfast", "movie snacks" and each time delete the items from the list I didn't have that time or edit the portions of each ingrediant. For example, if I have an english breakfast, I might not want 2 eggs and a hashbrown every time, or I might decide not to have toast with it that day.

What are my options?

Thanks very much

spacetreemonkey

Turns out the answer is adding your ingrediants to meals, then adding your meal from your food diary add foods and it generates a list :-D

Lietchi

Meals are my go to method. The list of items shows up in your diary, you can easily delete items and change the quantities of each individual part.

Recipes are way more rigid, its just one line in your diary. If you want to make changes, you need to change the original recipe.

spacetreemonkey

Lietchi wrote: »

Meals are my go to method. The list of items shows up in your diary, you can easily delete items and change the quantities of each individual part.

Yeah, it sounds like the way to go. It will make tracking much faster!

lynn_glenmont

I think for the most part, it works best to use meals for meals -- a collection of foods you typically eat together but may vary the amount of the individual foods each time you have it, or maybe you change up some of the individual foods -- so maybe you have a meal named Sandwich and the meal includes the two different kinds of bread/buns you use, the three or four different proteins (deli meat, tuna, cheese, roasted chicken, etc.) that you might put one or two of in your sandwich, two or three different condiments that you alternate in sandwiches, maybe a couple of toppings you sometimes use, like avocado or hummus). You log the meal, delete the things you didn't use that time, change any quantities as needed for the remaining ingredient. The underlying meal remains the same.

Personally, I have meals for things like oatmeal + add-ins; smoothies with all the different things I put in smoothies; Chipotle, with the things I eat there (e.g., carnitas and barbacoa, not chicken or steak, black beans not pinto, etc.), so I can log the meal and delete the things I didn't eat; Cafe Rio, same deal as Chipotle; & Pizza and Mod Pizza (two pizza chains with the Chipotle ordering model), etc.

Then, use "recipe" for things that are recipes -- a list of ingredients that you combine in a dish (soup, stew, casserole, baked goods, etc.). You have no way to figure out how much of each individual ingredient you eat when you have some of that dish, so you're not going to want to fiddle with the individual ingredients when you log it. You just indicate how many servings you had (when you create the recipe you state you how many servings in the recipe, and I always include the number of grams in a serving in the name of the recipe -- other people just set the number of servings equal to the number of grams in the whole finished recipe, then just log the number of grams in the amount they dish up as the number of servings they're eating).

If you make the same recipe another time, you can edit the recipe if you decide to omit something or add something or make a substitution or use different amounts. But, again, you don't want to fiddle with the individual amounts when you log it.