How to log calories in a recipe question

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charelaine
charelaine Posts: 712 Member
in Food and Nutrition
So let's say you are cooking at home and you make something like spaghetti. You know what ingredients you added, but how do you know the serving size?

I make lots of things and I can keep all the ingredients listed and see that the total calories are XYZ, but I am never sure how to divide it into portions. My soups are particularly this way.

Maybe I'm missing something or maybe I'm dumb but I really don't. Know. How.

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  • avonarlene86
    avonarlene86 Posts: 23 Member
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    I normally weigh the dish I'm using, whether that's a casserole dish, soup pot, what have you, and keep a note of that. Then once you've listed your ingredients (say your recipe serves 4), weight everything including the dish, minus the eeight if the dish you previously recorded, and divide by 4, does that make sense? For example, I know now that my pasta bake recipe, 1 portion is 250g so I can weigh and add easily.
  • kommodevaran
    kommodevaran Posts: 17,890 Member
    edited May 2016
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    You get to decide how big a portion is and you must decide how much you want to eat. So this may be two questions in one.

    The first part is the practical part. Weigh all the ingredients, and weigh the finished dish minus the dish (lol, English is strange), and the number of grams (or ounces) of the contents, will be the number of servings. When you serve yourself, weigh that, and the grams (ounces) is the number of servings you log.

    The second part is to find out how big that meal should be. Figure out how many calories you have for dinner, or decide how big your dinner/meal should be. Serve yourself an amount of food that has that many calories.
  • Madwife2009
    Madwife2009 Posts: 1,369 Member
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    kommodevaran wrote: »
    The first part is the practical part. Weigh all the ingredients, and weigh the finished dish minus the dish (lol, English is strange), and the number of grams (or ounces) of the contents, will be the number of servings. When you serve yourself, weigh that, and the grams (ounces) is the number of servings you log.

    This is exactly what I do - each gram of the finished recipe is one serving. I then weigh out the portion I want to eat and that's how many servings I have.

    I also find that home-made recipes can vary in weight (uncooked and therefore cooked also) - for example, when I make shepherd's pie, the weight of the onions will not be the same each time I make it as I use two or three onions depending on size. I'm not going to waste part of an onion just to make it fit with the recipe, I'd rather throw the entire thing in. So I edit the recipe to allow for variances - it's really easy to do once the recipe is set up and you can change the amount of servings as well, depending on what the final weight is.

  • charelaine
    charelaine Posts: 712 Member
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    Thank you guys.

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