I don't have much control over what is made for dinner

Ask her what she put in the dish and use the recipe builder to enter the recipe and log it. I would be most concerned about amounts of calorie dense ingredients like cheese, oil, pasta and less about if she used 1/2 tsp basil vs1 tsp basil or 6 oz spinach vs 8 oz spinach.
If she does not follow a recipe or will not tell you what she put in then you might find a similar recipe online and log it. If you have to guess then 500-600 calories per serving might be a good starting point for many recipes.

You could ask for less mixed dish/one pot type recipes and more meals where the parts are easier to log individually.
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Just get her to write down what she uses in each meal and the weights of each item and then add it to MFP as a recipe. Then when she does that meal again all you will need to do is adjust amounts of each item or log it as the same because after all even with being 100% accurate with weights there will still be a margin of error

If she really doesn't know then just log something similar even if you have to log items seperatley i.e. 30g boiled carrots, 20g peas etc

I use the recipe builder tool a lot. Do you have a food scale? It so, would your wife be opposed to weighing/measuring items and then you could actually do the recipe builder?

Honestly, I make a lot of simple meals that don't have a lot of ingredients so this is easy for me at my house (my husband and I share cooking responsibilities--I generally cook more during the week and he cooks more during the weekend). I just make sure to weigh my portions out.

I cook most of my meals, so I have had to get really familiar with the recipes feature of myfitnesspal. But I know that can be harder if you aren't the one who is cooking. Even if you aren't the one cooking most of the time, maybe you can get involved with her with planning the meals for the week? That also might make it easier for you to get recipes ahead of time entered in etc to make logging faster. My husband and I basically sit down and plan the week every weekend for our shopping trip anyway so I also enter recipes at that time.

A quick tip - if she gets a lot of her recipes off the internet, have her send you the link and it is really easy to import them into the recipes tab on myfitnesspal, or even to just copy-paste the recipe ingredients in there. Then you can save it for next time. I do this ALL THE TIME and it saves me a lot of time - after doing that for about a month or so I have most of our repeat recipes already in here for next time. Another tip: if you can measure the recipe serving size first time you make it (e.g. 1 cup) put that in the recipe title for yourself for next time e.g. one of my recipes is "homemade chili (1 cup serving size)" - I had jarred it all in mason jars before freezing and used that to know how many cups total the recipe makes when entering # of servings on the site.

If she is mostly making things she has come up with on her own, maybe you can get her to write down or type up some of your family's favorite recipes that she makes frequently, you can then get a "family cookbook" out of it, which is nice to have anyway, but also then you can go enter them into myfitnesspal and save them for yourself in the recipes area for tracking purposes too.

GreenValli wrote: »

Not making any judgments here! But the fact is not all men cook. In fact, not all women cook either. He still has a great benefit.

Unless you've personally eaten the food his wife is preparing for him, and analyzed it nutritionally as well, you have no idea what it is or is not.

As others have mentioned, use the recipe builder to get the information for dinner.
Another that might help you if she's not a planner and you don't know what she's making until it's time to eat. Log that dinner as the next days breakfast and then use the next days breakfast and lunch entries as lunch and dinner. This will allow you to adjust the meals you can plan for around the dinner calories. I read this on the forums a while ago, but don't remember who posted it to give them the credit for the idea.