how do you track all home-cooked meals?

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  • NormInv
    NormInv Posts: 3,303 Member
    My biggest issue is that I have to delete the entire meal before re-entering it. Let me explain.

    I input all the ingredients in one location such as 'Lunch'. So if I am making a pound of chicken, I will input that, along with say an onion, broth, cream etc. Then I define that as a meal. Now that it is a meal, I go to the 'My Meals' section and pick say 0.2 of this huge meal because it made 5 servings. The problem is that, first I have to delete all the entries under 'Lunch' that I made to define it as a meal. Its a pain.
  • snooj
    snooj Posts: 69 Member
    Oddly, I find it easiest to record home cooked meals! In MFP's recipe section, I record everything. It doesn't matter if you deviate from a recipe, just record what your substitute instead. Once everything is done, portion it into even meals. So if you made a batch of food that totals to 1000g and want four meals out of it, get four containers and put 250g in each. This technically isn't perfect; one container may have higher calorie foods than another, but it's close enough.

    My biggest problem with this is that even though the food diary lets you change the serving size of a food, the recipe thing in MFP doesn't. So if the next time I make turkey bean soup I use more onions, I have to delete the onions and search for it again. Minor, but annoying. Overall, once you have a recipe once, it's pretty quick to find out how much a home cooked meal is.
  • xiofett
    xiofett Posts: 138 Member
    The only problems I've had is when I make things like chicken stock and then try to use that in other recipes. If I left the meat and veggies in there and called it a soup, that's one thing, but stying to figure out just the calories in the stock itself without everything else doesn't work.

    And then there's the home cured Canadian bacon I made. (I like to play in the kitchen, what can I say?) The stuff tastes AMAZING, but do I log it as pork tenderloin, ham, or use a commercial Canadian bacon entry? Again, I haven't figured out how to account for the salt and sugar in the brine. Ok, I'm not really worried about the sugar, but I do try to at least keep an eye on my sodium intake.

    I'll have to try the "weigh the whole thing and divide by 100g" trick. That's brilliant.
  • shayemimi
    shayemimi Posts: 203 Member
    I really dislike the editing in the "my recipes" section. You can't alter the amounts of the ingredients; you have to delete the old and reenter the new.

    Not true!! You can edit them from a computer - you just can't edit using the app. I just updated one of my recipes! :)

    Go to the Food tab> Recipies> Click the name of a recipe. You can add and remove ingredients from this screen.

    Yes you can add and remove ingredients, but if you want to change it from 1/4 cup cheese to 1/2 cup cheese you have to delete the cheese and reenter, you can't just change the amount.

    OP, I cook just about every night and I have created base recipes for all my meals. For stuff like spaghetti, I create the sauce as one recipe and figure out how much it'll yield (like someone else said, if it feeds your family of 5 for 2 meals, I'd call it 10 servings). I then log the pasta separately. If it's two boxes and your family of 5 eats twice off that meal, then log 1/5 the box of pasta.

    It is a pain to initially log the recipes, but once they're in there, especially if they are stuff you eat frequently, it's easier in the long run. I just sat down one day and logged and logged recipes that I make fairly frequently so they'd be there. If I know I change up certain stuff (like using different veggies) I leave that piece out and log it separately.

    Can't edit amounts on the website, true. You can with the App though. I do it all the time.

    Go to: more>edit food and exercises


    OMG thank you!!! I always found editing recipes a pain, but now I'll just use my phone or tablet. I tend to use the website when I'm home for logging. AWESOME! Thanks again!
  • lisamarie2181
    lisamarie2181 Posts: 560 Member
    I really dislike the editing in the "my recipes" section. You can't alter the amounts of the ingredients; you have to delete the old and reenter the new. I find that most of the time my ingredients are approximately the same so I'll enter the recipe once and unless it changes drastically, I'll use it again next time even if my amounts are a bit off. If it's drastically different, I edit my recipe to reflect that. It's a pain to do, though.
    What I do is I enter the recipe and estimate how many portions it will feed the family. In your example of spaghetti sauce, 3 days for 5 people would be 15 portions. I then take what I want (within reason) of the sauce and count it as one portion.
    I also go to the database and enter a dish and see if something comes up (particularly "homemade") that is similar and where the calorie count sounds reasonable. I'll then use that.

    In the end, it's all about being vigilant in what we eat and reasonable about how we count the calories.

    You're doing great by thinking along these lines. It shows dedication and commitment. Way to go! You're going to do great!


    You can edit recipes on the app, I know on the iPhone all the way to the right is a button that says more and you can edit everything you have manually put in. when in the recipe, all you do is click on the food item you want to edit for serving size and it will bring up the nutrition info and will let you change the serving size you used. Same goes for changing the amount of servings in the whole recipe. I am not sure how others phone apps are, but I know you can do all that on the app on an iPhone. Obviously you can go on the computer to change it too, but I do all my changes on the app.

    Also, it does keep the orginal setting too under "my foods" or "recent". So if I had a big salad in there at 600 cals, if I go to edit it to use for a new day with different servings, under your foods the original one will still be there. So everytime you edit there will be multiple entries with the same title but the cals will be different to whatever you changed them too

    Hope this helps!
  • felinaslp
    felinaslp Posts: 30 Member
    Thank you everybody for your ideas! I had thought about trying to weigh my food, but wasn't sure how to go about it. So, if you weight the finished cooked meal, you weigh it in the pan or pot you cooked it in and just subtract the weight of the pan? Not sure my little kitchen scale can handle the weight of my heavy pan...lol. Also good to know that recipes can be edited on my tablet!

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