Recipes vs. Meals

SecondLastchance

Just curious of when to save a group of foods as a recipe vs saving as a meal. It seems saving as a meal (especially if you are not going to make your recipe public) is an easier way to go. Although it takes up more visible space on your diary, you can edit it much more easily. e.g you have a glass of milk, or don't have a glass of milk for that meal.

I am just interested how others approach this.

Thanks

janicelo1971

ok,,,my pic didn't show up...ill try this again later:)

bwogilvie

I use a recipe if it's actually a recipe: that is, a dish that I cook from scratch. Friday night I made braised cabbage with rice and beans; I created an MFP recipe with all the ingredients as I weighed and added them, so that I knew how many calories were in the total dish and in each serving. I then measured out servings and put half in the freezer. Now when I thaw out the leftovers, I just log servings accordingly. Tonight I'm making an Ethiopian-inspired vegan stew, and I have already created the recipe for that.

I tend to use meals only for breakfast, given that I cook a lot of different foods - I've created over 100 recipes in the last 16 months on MFP. I should probably create a few meals for the lunches that I routinely eat; that could save a bit of time.

F00LofaT00K

I personally don't use the meal option because my diet is so varied, but I'm under the impression it's for meals that you eat often, for example: 6oz steak, 150g potatoes, 150g salad and 4oz wine. <--(NOT a recipe) If you have that very often it may be easier to save it as a meal instead of adding the individual foods each time. But if I'm baking cupcakes, I'm not going to sit here and do the math for each ingredient that ends up in each individual cupcake and end up logging .000002g baking powder, 35g flour, 15g butter, etc. I'm going to add the entire recipe to the recipe database and then set the correct number of servings in the recipe and add "1 cupcake" to my diary.

Onedayslimmfp

I use the recipe option frequently, I find it easier to do it this way rather than adding food items individually. However when I recreate the recipe, I just tweak the ingredients in the recipe as I can never get the exact weights from previously, for example a lamb curry recipe has sweet potato in it, the last time I made it, it had 175g, this time only 150g.

bwogilvie

I use the recipe option frequently, I find it easier to do it this way rather than adding food items individually. However when I recreate the recipe, I just tweak the ingredients in the recipe as I can never get the exact weights from previously, for example a lamb curry recipe has sweet potato in it, the last time I made it, it had 175g, this time only 150g.

I tweak my recipes too if quantities or ingredients change. It's easier to do on the iOS mobile apps than on the website, except for recipes created with the new website recipe creator.