Serving Sizes

laurenz2501
laurenz2501 Posts: 839 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Sorry in advance if this was already covered, but after looking through a few pages of searches, i gave up.

How do you know what 1 serving of a whole dish is? Mainly something like a casserole or pasta dish or something that isn't so...obvious? I'm just confused what to put when I use the recipe builder and it asks how many servings the recipe is. Take for example spaghetti & meatballs. Is 1 serving 1 scoop? Or 2? Some people can eat half a bowl or a whole bowl to themselves...so how do I know an entire casserole dish or something is 4 servings or 5 or 3? :huh: Just trying to have a more accurate calorie count.

Replies

  • Pebble321
    Pebble321 Posts: 6,423 Member
    The idea of using the recipe builder is to make it suit you.

    That means you enter all the ingredients you use and you choose how many servings are in that dish. So, if you make a casserole and it makes 6 of YOUR sized serves, you put 6 servings.

    There is no right or wrong here, it's up to you to determine how many serves. Because my husband typically has a bigger portion than me, I'll often enter 5 servings for one recipe. That means it would make 5 of MY sized serves, but in practice it actually makes 2 smaller serves for me and 2 larger serves for him.

    And remember that you can change the number of serves. I often estimate when I first enter a recipe but when we've had dinner I look at how much is left and I may be able to see that we've eaten nearly all of it. That probably means that I ate 1/3 of the dish, so I enter 3 servings.
  • imeridian
    imeridian Posts: 1
    A serving size is whatever you want it to be and is convenient for you to measure. Tonight I made a lasagna, it was easy to divide the 13x9 pan into nine squares, thus I had nine servings. The other night I made a soup, I used a particular ladle and scooped all of the soup into its storage container, each ladle being a serving, for a total of seven ladles of soup. On another occasion I made a pasta dish, it was easiest to just divide it into quarters while scooping it out of the pot. Hopefully my examples will help you.

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