Confused about recipe analyser servings

I think I'm going to finally break down and try to figure out the recipe analyser. One think that confuses me, though, is how to guess how many servings a recipe makes. I want to make a stew by pretty much winging it, but because I won't be working from a recipe I won't know how many servings it makes until I'm done. I know a serving should be about a cup but I don't know how many cups the stew will be.

How would other people handle this?

It's a little annoying but the way I do it is after making the stew/soup/whatever I'll laddle it out of the pot into a storage container using my measuring cup so I know how many cups in total I made.  Then I go and enter the recipe in the recipe analyser using how ever many servings I made.

There are a few ways to do it.... First would be to work on a 10oz (300g) serving rather than a 'cup'.   Set the serving size to 1 initially and when you've done the full recipe and pressed 'analyse' you'll be able to see 'serving size... XXXXg'   Divide by 300g and that's your number of servings.

Second way would be to take the protein element of your stew e.g. the beef,  and split it up so that a 'serving' is 3-4oz.  So if you start with 1lb of beef, that would mean your finished stew had 4 or 5 servings.

And the third way would be to take the total calories for the dish.... and divide it by the number of calories you want to eat.  So if the full dish is 2000 cals and you want a meal that is 400 cals.... you set the servings to '5' and then you know how big a portion to serve up.

gi-jane: those are good solutions! especially the first one which is closest to what I had in mind. I didn't know you could reset the number of servings but it's a simple way to find the weight of the whole dish without breaking my poor little kitchen scale.

My serving bowls are around 300 ml when full so 300 grams works too.

My personal system of weight-control is a 1400-1500 cal day for weight-loss and a 2000-2100 cal day for maintenance.  So I work with a basic 400-500 cal meal... three of those every day....  and then top up with snacks and other extras, or not if I need to lose a few pounds.

So I work all recipes back to a 400-500 cal base for 1 serving and, when making dishes for more than one person, I 'multiply up' rather than divide down. 

Another approach that I use is to actually enter the recipe (rather than "add a serving to my food log").  I only do this if I think I will be making something more or less the same rather frequently because it is a pain to enter the directions.  This allows me to edit the recipe if I make a significant change, like adding a kilo of zucchini rather than the 500 grams the recipe calls for.  That allows me to use the vegetables and other ingredients I have on hand, but still be reasonably accurate with my logging.  The servings can be changed at will, also, if you press the radio button that adjusts the recipe to 100 gram equivalents, you can enter the actual number of grams you eat, rather than a "serving".  I find this especially handy for leftovers, since there are never even numbers of servings in anything that I make!

The way I do it is I increase the number of servings in the recipe until the amount of calories per serving satisfies me :). Then I use kitchen scales/measuring cups to get the serving size the analyzer calculated for me.

Or

by setting the number of servings at 1 you'll get the total weight of the product (let's say you made a pot of soup and religiously measured every single ingredient). Let's say the analyzer says you have 2400 mg in this 1 serving. You then divide it by 240 (240 mL is 1 cup) and get 10. 10 servings.

There's an edit button on the recipes so you can change the ingredients or servings anytime you want. If I make it regularly, I make it into a saved recipe. I make my best guess for new recipes using, as GIJane suggested, the protein element. When I eat the thing and find out what a true filling unmeasured serving is, I edit if necessary. Usually I am taking the calorie number down not up because I anticipate large servings and find I am often satisfied with less.

The recipe analyzer and saver is one of the best parts of CC. It's lots of fun to take a recipe and then see all the nutrition facts!

Make sure you read and follow the hints that are under the Question Mark at the top. This is important to minimize warning messages concerning your analysis. Often a warning symbol is because you don't have your measurements described the same as the options for that ingredient in the CC db. Sometimes you need to link the ingredient to a specific item in the db. It gets a lot easier each time!