Help Recording Recipe

ithacaborn

Hi,

Tonight, I made a simple noodle and sausage dish for dinner. It consisted of vegetables, noodles, sausage, and herbs. I weighed the veggies before putting them into the pan and did the same with the sausage. I then got the weight of the noodles after they were cooked.

I put a bowl on the scale and tared it out before putting everything in the bowl. It weighed 1499 grams. When I served it, we each got 355 grams.

Tonight, when I entered everything into MFP, I put all the ingredients into the Recipe tab and entered them individually.

Is this the proper way of weighing things? Should I have done it differently? I'm really confused about how to weigh things, and I'd appreciate any help you can give me.

Thank you.

Chip

Lietchi

If you save ingredients as a meal instead of a recipe
- when you add a portion to your meal, the individual ingredients appear in your diary (upside for some, downside for others, but I prefer it because I can more easily do a visual check in my diary of how many veggies I ate etc.)
- you have access to your recent and frequent foods
- It's easier to make variations of the same recipe, replacing one ingredient for another

(I usually create and modify meals from my diary, on an empty day in the future, and then use the 'save as a meal' option)

ithacaborn wrote: »

Leitchi,

Just to be clear, in my example above you wouldn’t weigh the noodles separately, the sausage separately, and the veggies separately. You put them all together and then weigh?

I'm not sure I understand your question: I mentioned weighing the raw ingredients individually?
Or do you mean the cooked food?
Everything being served together doesn't need to be weighed individually after cooking, if you weighed them raw beforehand.

For example:
- if your cooked sausage, noodles and veggies are all mixed together in the same bowl for serving/ taking your portion (I'm imagining sausage and veggies cut into pieces...), weigh the cooked items together (both the whole as the individual portions)
- If your sausage is served directly from the pan, your veggies in one bowl and your noodles in the other, where proportions between the 3 different foods can vary, then you weigh the cooked veggies, noodles and sausage separately, both the entire amount as well as your individual portion.

A lot depends on context:
- if you're only cooking for yourself and you eat everything in one meal, you don't even need to weigh the cooked food afterwards, only the raw ingredients
- if you're cooking for yourself and know you will eat the food over two meals, you could also only weigh raw and not cooked, and just log 0.5 of the recipe/meal one day and 0.5 the next, without even weighing the portions
- if you're cooking for yourself but not sure over how many meals your will eat the food or if you will eat it all, see below (as if cooking for several people)
- if you're cooking for multiple people, then it's more important to cooked the finished foods and your individual portion (that's my situation, because my portions are very different to my BF)

Lietchi

I'm not a fan of the recipe builder, I prefer the Meals functionality, but it comes down to the same thing:
- weigh and log all of the individual raw ingredients into the recipe/meal (using entries that correspond with the raw food)
- weight the finished dish
- weigh your portion
- log your portion into your diary - in your specific case here that's 0.237 of the recipe

You weighed your noodles cooked which is fine (I prefer weighing raw because it's more precise, depending on how long you cook your noodles the cooked weight will vary.). But if you do that, you need to make sure you use a database entry for cooked noodles then when adding that to the recipe.

ithacaborn

Leitchi,

Just to be clear, in my example above you wouldn’t weigh the noodles separately, the sausage separately, and the veggies separately. You put them all together and then weigh?

Also, why do you like the Meal tab better? What does it do for you that the Recipe doesn’t? I’m still trying to figure my way around, so any thoughts are appreciated.

Chip

ithacaborn

Yes, I see what you are saying.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

Chip