Recipe /serving question

lmrodgers07

I made spaghetti yesterday, put all ingredients into the recipe on MFP. I dont know how many servings the whole recipe is. I only know that I had two cups of it. How do I figure out what two cups is?

AnnPT77

I'm sorry to say I think that may have been a learning experience. 😉 All of us have some of those when beginning to use MFP.

What I do, when I record a recipe in MFP, is weigh the total finished product (subtracting the weight of the pan or bowl it's in, of course), and put the number of grams as the number of servings. MFP will give a message, I forget the exact text, but basically saying "did you really mean that giant number of servings", but it will let me add the recipe that way. Then, when I log the food in my diary, I weigh my portion, and log that number of servings.

It's not necessary to be that exact, if you don't want to. You could think about the size of your spaghetti sauce pan, maybe it's a two quart pan but only about three-quarters full, so you could decide there were close enough to 6 cups in total, then set that as the number of servings, and measure out the amount you eat in cups.

If it's something more structured, like I made a dozen muffins, I'd probably just put twelve into the number of servings the recipe makes, and call that close enough. Even for a pan of lasagna, if I was going to eat part and freeze part, I'd maybe cut the big pan into sixteen sort of equal pieces, and say it was 16 servings. Later, if I eat two pieces, that's two servings, and I can use decimals if I eat maybe one and a half pieces or something.

Somehow or other, though, it's necessary to come up with a number of servings when putting the recipe into MFP that's going to make it possible to log servings in a sensible way later. You can also edit the recipe after the fact, and change the number of servings, if needful.