Help me figure out calories in this recipe: Spaghetti sauce with meat and veggies

brendak76
brendak76 Posts: 241 Member
edited November 14 in Food and Nutrition
I need some help figuring out calories in this. I'm making spaghetti for my family tonight. Here's what I do.
I have a package of 1.38lbs of 85% lean ground beef.
I pulse 8oz of mushrooms and 1 medium onion in the Ninja and then brown it with the beef. Then drain. Then I add 2 jars of spaghetti sauce and heat. I can get calories from the jar of sauce easily.

Do I weigh it all before browning and then subtract the liquid I drain? The liquid is both fat and mushroom juices. Plus my pan is way bigger than my scale. I can't put a hot pan on the scale. Do I weigh the juices I drain?

I'm an expert weighing food for carb counting because my son and I are both diabetic, but I stink at weighing family meals for caloric intake. I'd like to be able to say 100g of this sauce = this many calories. I haven't put it in the recipe builder yet. Waiting to see what you all say for how to do this.

Replies

  • abatonfan
    abatonfan Posts: 1,120 Member
    I am also interested in seeing what others think. I'm also diabetic and pretty good at weighing foods for carb counts but want to start importing some common family recipes so that my calorie counts and insulin dosages are a bit more accurate.

    If there is a liquid beef fat or lard entry on MFP, could you add that to the recipe and use a negative serving (such as putting in -100 as the serving if one serving of beef fat is 1g, and you drained out 100g) so that those calories are subtracted from the total amount in the recipe? Could you also weigh a can, write down the weight, pour the fat into the can, let that cool, and then weigh the can and beef and subtract that weight minus the can's weight to get the total amount of fat drained?

    Once everything is cooked, you could then weigh the entire thing of sauce and set one serving to be 100g (I like to put down "Recipe Name -100g cooked" as my recipe name in order to remind myself of the serving size), weigh your portion, and then log it as how many servings.
  • MysticRealm
    MysticRealm Posts: 1,264 Member
    I would weigh everything before cooking and just ignore the liquid that gets drained out.
  • MsDandimite
    MsDandimite Posts: 52 Member
    I really like the recipe analyzer here caloriecount.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php. Once you've entered all the ingredients you can choose to see the calorie amount for different measurements, including 100g.
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