Adding recipes

I make big batches of soups or stews to eat for lunch throughout the week. I add all the raw ingredients to the recipe, and when it's done cooking, I put it in a big plastic bowl with a one cup measuring cup. Then, however many cups it is, is the number of servings, and one cup is serving size. For lunch, I may take 1 or 2 cups, or maybe I just want half. But then it's always easy to tally.

A recipe makes a batch of something, a cake, a pan of lasagna, a pot of beef stew, a batch of homemade ice cream. You usually don't eat the whole thing, but you take a portion (a serving) of the whole thing. It is customary to measure that portion by volume (cup, slice, piece, scoop) or weight (ounces, grams). Measuring by weight is normally more accurate than by volume, but many people do it by volume for the convenience, or because they don't have a food scale. I did not use a food scale until I reached maintenance, so I measured everything by volume while I was losing.

There are lots of ways to determine what size to make a portion, it is up to you. For a pot of stew, you can either weigh the final batch and make a serving size one ounce or one gram, or one fifth of the total weight, or the weight of the whole batch.

Suppose you choose to make your portion size 1 cup and you don't care about the weight.

Make the stew, enter all of the total amounts of ingredients to the Recipe Tool and guess that your pot of stew will make 6 cups. Put the number of servings as 6 into the Recipe Tool for starters; you can always go back and edit the recipe to change how many servings the batch actually made.

When the pot of stew is done, take a 1 cup measuring cup and measure out how many cups the final batch makes as you scoop it into a second pot. Suppose the final count of full cups was 6, but you had about a half cup of stew left. Just add some water to the seventh cup to make it a full cup, and stir that seventh cup into the rest. Now you have a batch of stew that measures a total of 7 cups.

Edit the recipe in the Recipe Tool to change 6 servings to 7 servings.The Recipe Tool will now calculate the Calories and other nutrient information per cup serving.

When you serve the stew, measure out by cups. So if someone takes 2 cups of the stew, log 2 servings of the recipe. If someone takes one and a half cups, log 1.5 servings of the recipe.