Counting Intake

misstwib

This is probably the hardest part for me with meals and cooking, most meals I make at home follow just some basic rules with little actual recipe. I can get the base calories/fats/ect from the proteins or stables (which in my house is usually white jasmine rice, chicken, salmon, steak, or ground beef in the order of most often consumed) but then all the little things added? Sugars, spices, seasonings. Or when I do soomething completely from scratch such as my rosemary pasta noodles, homemade gelato icecream, ect. I just feel at a loss for what to calculate, and I've tried but just have a hard time wrapping my head around this.

Any thoughts, tips, or anything else? I could give an example of one of my staple dishes even.

Siracha Beef

about a lb of sirloin, cut into thin squares, left to sit in a combination of brown sugar (3-4 tablespoons?), mirin (quarter to half a cup) and siracha (enough to coat... uh... i really just eye this one particularly)
One zucchini, sliced thin
add both to wok and cook, adding 5-spice seasoning, and sesame seeds, and more siracha if needed?
Serve over white rice.

This usually is enough for 3 people (or two, as my roommate will easily eat 2 servings). My own portion is usually about a cup of rice, and 2-3 ladel-spoons of the beef.

and thats generally how I cook.

laurenjill

Definitely invest in a food scale(with a tare function!). Weigh and measure everything! Use the recipe builder on the website to estimate calories for an entire recipe, then enter the total amount of servings for your recipe. You can also save and edit recipes for future use. The great part about having the tare function on your scale is that you can add multiple ingredients to your dish in the same bowl/pan/plate/whatever, and all you have to do is reset it every time instead of using a new dish. Another thing I like to do(mostly out of curiosity) is weigh the prepared dish after I've put it into the recipe builder, then calculate my portions. For example, let's say I prepare a dish that serves four. The entire weight of my dish is 20 ounces, so when you divide that by four, one serving is 5 ounces. If the recipe builder says that my dish is 800 calories total, then one serving is 200 calories.