How do you log your homemade food?

This is what I do:

Step 1: Open up the "create recipe" option on MFP
Step 2: Log all ingredients that are going into the recipe along with the amount
Step 3: Cook it all up
Step 4: Weigh the complete cooked food. Look at the total calories for the cooked food based on ingredients. Divide the total calories by a number that gets me ~500 calories in a serving. Divide the weight of the cooked food by that same number to get weight per serving.
Step 5: Use my food scale to divvy it up into portions based on weight to put one serving into different tupperwares
Step 6: Pull a "serving" from the fridge and eat it, then use the recipe to log "1 serving" into MFP.

you have to weigh or measure the entire pot of whatever you made to determine the portions - a lot of times I base my portion numbers on the calorie counts, if it's a casserole for instance (I use rectangular pans) if the cals are low I can make it 4-6 portions if the cals are high then I make it 6-8 portions. Soups, stews, chili, anything like that I use my 2 cup measuring cup and measure it into the container I intend to use to keep it in the fridge, and I decide whether or not the serving sizes are by the calories again. Soups can be very low cal and you can have a 2 cup portion and still be under 400 cals.

I made a batch of homemade taco soup last night. This is going to sound super tedious, but this is what I did. I got a giant bowl, and started scooping the soup out of the pot and into the bowl with a 1 cup measuring cup, counting as I went. Turns out the whole soup had 8 cups, so I divided my recipe into 4 servings, at 2 cups a serving. Tedious I know but.....gotta do what you gotta do!

This is exactly what i do as well, tedious yes, horrible no, worth it yes. If you arent logging exactly what you are eating it can throw your calorie goal off without you knowing it.

An alternative (which I have considered but haven't got round to doing) is to weigh each of your cooking pots and note down to the weights (or even Sharpie them onto the bottom).
Then, when you've finished cooking your dish, weigh it all including the pot and then subtract the weight of the pot.
You can then weigh your portion and work it out as a proportion of the whole.

Does that make any sense?!

(edited for spelling)

It totally makes sense, problem is I cook soups and chilis in such large batches that it's too heavy for my food scale and maxes out. hahahhah.

It's awesome advice, but yeah - I've got the same problem as you! My big cookpot weighs in excess of 3lb empty - easily maxes out even my "big" food scale. Not sure of the solution yet, so in for ideas.

At the moment I eyeball. Which is terrible of me, I know. I do a lot of homecooking (most week nights and at least once on the weekend). I have nine pages of recipes, and I tweak each one every time I cook it to make sure the total recipe is correct. And I still have to guess how much of the whole pot is my serving. I'm almost ashamed to call myself a consistent logger!

Hmm, well, it wouldn't be nearly as accurate but would be better than eyeballing... Could you weigh the whole pot on a people/bathroom scale? Mine is accurate to with 1/4lb (or at least says it is) - that wouldn't too bad to get an overall estimate or would at least be a start? :flowerforyou:

This is also difficult for me. I have tried using the recipe builder, but if you don't know how big or how many potions are in it what do you do? For example, if you see a recipe and it doesn't say how many servings it is, what do you do? If it is soup and you want the serving size to be one cup, how do you know how many cups are in the whole recipe?

I agree. The hard part is figuring out how many serving there are.

An alternative (which I have considered but haven't got round to doing) is to weigh each of your cooking pots and note down to the weights (or even Sharpie them onto the bottom).
Then, when you've finished cooking your dish, weigh it all including the pot and then subtract the weight of the pot.
You can then weigh your portion and work it out as a proportion of the whole.

Does that make any sense?!

(edited for spelling)

It totally makes sense, problem is I cook soups and chilis in such large batches that it's too heavy for my food scale and maxes out. hahahhah.

I estimate serving sizes. I've always estimated them. Actually weighing out servings is a little too over-the-top for me. Most of my recipes feed five (two servings each for me and my husband, two half-servings for my four year old). I take about 1/5th. If I'm feeling really anal, I'll serve up everyone's portions. For soup or chili, sometimes I'll serve up all the dining and leftover containers right away, or I'll look at the pot and guess the servings.

Here's the thing about weighing the final recipe: It's still not 100% accurate. I mean, you add stew meat, carrots, onion, kale, broth, spices, wine, greens, etc to make a stew. But one portion may have more meat than another, or more carrots, even though the scale says they are the same weight. Despite being the same weight, they don't have the precise, same number of calories because the ingredients in each bowl vary slightly.

This is one circumstance where I think close enough is good enough. I can be bothered to weigh ingredients as I add them, and edit recipes on MFP, but I can't be bothered to weigh my cookware, subtract that weight from the total, divide the total into servings, and then weigh each portion. That seems like something I won't do for the rest of my life, so I won't do it now either.

At the moment I eyeball. Which is terrible of me, I know. I do a lot of homecooking (most week nights and at least once on the weekend). I have nine pages of recipes, and I tweak each one every time I cook it to make sure the total recipe is correct. And I still have to guess how much of the whole pot is my serving. I'm almost ashamed to call myself a consistent logger!

It's not terrible to eyeball! I aim to not let perfect be the enemy of good, and if you're logging the ingredients pretty precisely, it's not a huge deal to eyeball the portions if you're honest with yourself. That's my method, and it didn't hinder my weight loss nor has it hindered my maintenance. And I have 34 pages of recipes so I obviously employ this method OFTEN.

Weigh each ingredient before cooking and either enter them all individually, or if it's something I make often and exactly the same, I enter a recipe.

My husband does it for me when he cooks, and when we're eating together we weigh everything and I just log half of it. I even weigh the plates once it's dished up sometimes, to make sure the portions are even :sad:

I log everything as individual items in my food diary. I don't log spices though. I mostly ignore serving sizes if I'm logging food items in a recipe as individuals but like everyone said, using the recipe builder is a much better option.

My tip for homemade recipes is to weigh the whole lot at the end and say for example it is 2563grams I input it as 2563 portions and then I weigh out how much I use each time (eg 300 portions = 300g) and my family can have whatever they want. It also means if I am hungrier or have more cals on a day I can have a bigger portion

I started weighing my whole meal that I cooked and if the meal weighs 50 oz I say it serves 50 people and then log how many servings by the oz. So last night I had 10 servings of pasta. This makes it easy for me to take leftovers in smaller amounts.