Making your own recipes

bbryant573
bbryant573 Posts: 26 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Can someone explain to me how you count accurate calories when you make your own recipe for just yourself? For instance, I made my own salad - when I used the bag of iceberg salad - it said 1 1/2 cup is 15 calories that's what I measured out - added 4 oz of red bell pepper, 4 oz of sliced peeled cucumber, added some cooked ham etc... so when you go to make your own recipe - and you try to find your ingredient - it doesn't allow you to put in the exact amount of what you chopped up - so how do you accurately make recipes for just one person and make sure that you're logging everything correctly?

Replies

  • AmyRhubarb
    AmyRhubarb Posts: 6,890 Member
    If you're just making it for yourself, you can enter all the ingredients in the regular food log for your meal....that's what I do for most of my lunches.

    If I'm making a recipe or a dish that has more than one serving, I enter the total ingredients into the recipe builder, and set the number of servings appropriately. Sometimes I have to guess on the servings until after we've all had dinner - like tonight, I made fajitas, so I entered all the beef, onions, bell peppers, garlic and spices that I used, and chose a number of servings. Then I payed attention to how much my family ate (7 fajitas between the three of us, plus enough for one more left over), so I'll say it's 8 servings. When I log it, I choose the recipe and enter it in my dinner diary as two servings because I ate two.

    Make sense? :tongue:
  • bbryant573
    bbryant573 Posts: 26 Member
    Yes it does make sense - so when you did your bell peppers, onions etc.... did you use a measuring cup or a scale - when i made my salad last night for just me - I just chopped 4 oz of red bell peppers and 4 oz of cucumbers - I used a food kitchen scale -put the bowl on the scale then set the scale to 0.... but I went through the lists of 'red peppers' there's tons of different options - and according to the list not all red bell peppers have the same calorie count so how do you know? Or am I just putting too much thought into this?

    Thanks for your reply!
  • dbmata
    dbmata Posts: 12,950 Member
    Can someone explain to me how you count accurate calories when you make your own recipe for just yourself? For instance, I made my own salad - when I used the bag of iceberg salad - it said 1 1/2 cup is 15 calories that's what I measured out - added 4 oz of red bell pepper, 4 oz of sliced peeled cucumber, added some cooked ham etc... so when you go to make your own recipe - and you try to find your ingredient - it doesn't allow you to put in the exact amount of what you chopped up - so how do you accurately make recipes for just one person and make sure that you're logging everything correctly?

    I log the item and quantity used. Simple to do, but the "recipe" entry maker on this site is a messy.
  • bcattoes
    bcattoes Posts: 17,299 Member
    Yes it does make sense - so when you did your bell peppers, onions etc.... did you use a measuring cup or a scale - when i made my salad last night for just me - I just chopped 4 oz of red bell peppers and 4 oz of cucumbers - I used a food kitchen scale -put the bowl on the scale then set the scale to 0.... but I went through the lists of 'red peppers' there's tons of different options - and according to the list not all red bell peppers have the same calorie count so how do you know? Or am I just putting too much thought into this?

    Thanks for your reply!

    I know exactly what you mean! I check entries against this site: http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/

    If you have 4 oz and the entry is correct for 6 oz, then log .66 servings.

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