Homemade food cals????

smilingsam

Question?? How do you guys figure out how many cals something has that is homemade? Especially things like soup, casseroles, stirfrys... per serving. I know how much of the ingedients I put in (or round about hehe) I just dont know how many servings the resulting dish has and how big a serving should be on different multi ingredient meals, like stirfry.
I do alot of my own creation meals and I'm skimming fat and replacing high cal with low cal. For instance I made broccoli soup with chicken and made my own broth. Have no idea the servings or size. Short of measuring out the finished product in cups how can I figure the cals?

lauralynette

I ususally try to add it up caliore wise as I put in the pan and serving size, with soup and stir frys and cassoroles I conisider a cup a serving.
sometimes I will find a ready made meal that is simallar, I think the calories consumed in a day is always a little off no matter what you choose to eat.
I also tend to use this site to add up calories http://www.calorieking.com/ I find it easier at times to use.

melodyg

There is a recipe calculator on here. I have a couple of methods to figure out the number of servings. Either I look @ how many calories I want per serving and divide into servings to fit that calorie size, or I just divide by what looks like an easy number of servings to compute.

For stirfrys, fajitas, and things like that I usually just divide the recipe into 4 servings and eyeball it (I assume about a pound of meat plus veggies to go with it is enough for 4 servings). For things cooked in a casserole dish I usually divide by # of servings (usually 4-6 for an 8x8 pan or 8-12 for a 9x13 pan). For soups or sauces, I usually measure out in cups the first time I make it, make a cup a serving (or 1/4 or 1/2 cup for sauces) and assume it will make about the same number of servings each time I make that soup.

I'm not sure about calculating your own broth... maybe just use generic chicken or vegetable broth and know that you did better on the sodium than the boxed/canned stuff?

lisawest

One thing you can do is enter your recipe on here and put that it makes 1 serving. Then you can enter the fraction of the whole that you had. Or (and this is what I usually do) you can do the above, but don't save or finish it yet. Then during dinner, DH and I use a measuring cup rather than a serving spoon to dish it up. Then we know how much it made and how much we had. Amazingly, most of my recipes seem to make 6 or 7 cups. After dinner I then go and put in how many cups we got out of it, and enter how many I had. It takes a bit of planning the first time you make something, but if you stick to the same recipe, the next time will be MUCH simpler!

Hope that helped!

CakeFit21

You can also find a recipe nutrition calculator online. You would just enter your recipe ingredients by ingredient and then tell how many servings. I find this to be a total pain but absolutely critical to counting calories accurately.

Also, if you are making soup and you know how much total liquid you are adding then you can figure how many servings. If you've added 32oz of liquid you know that you have 4 8oz servings. This can also be done with a casserole, I suppose, if you know the weight of your ingredients, (measuring everything in ounces instead of cups). I've never done this with a casserole but the theory seems to work in my head :blushing: I'm a former pastry chef and this method works when figuring serving amounts for raw cake batter into a wedding cake.
Let me know if you think that method works, if not we can brainstorm something else

Here is a recipe converter that is somewhat convenient if you are using a web recipe because you can pretty much just copy and paste the text, (sometimes making a few adjustments) and it will give you a calorie. Saves you from the tedium of adding bit by bit.
http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

I agree with lauralynette calorie king is very helpful.