How do you count calories in a homecooked meal?

Say if I wanted to cook beef stew, how do I go about counting the calories?

I'm assuming that say, you measure the beef, how many oz. How many carrots you're putting into it, potatoes etc. and then what? lol do you add it all up and get the entire pot's caloric value? Then break it down by servings?

When using the recipe analyzer, you still have to weigh your food, obviously.  So, yes, I weigh everything (my scale calculates calories for most food items).  So, all of those calorie measured items end up in the pot.  When finished cooking, you then have to equally divide up everything into equal servings.  If it yeilds 6 equal bowl sizes, you divide your total calories by 6 and that's your "per serving" calories.  It's more difficult than guessing, but I feel better dividing it up equally and knowing what the precise total is.  Of course, you also have to make sure that each "bowl" has APPROXIMATELY the same amount of meat, potato, carrot, sauce, etc.  If you aren't serving 6 people at one time, then I take out gladware and divide it up that way.  You can freeze it for a later meal, with cals all pre-figured!  If you leave it sitting in fridge, you could be tempted by getting seconds ( I would be, at least)

I do not like the caloriecount recipe analyzer for that very reason.  I use the website www.nutritiondata.com for analyzing recipes.  Their site is wonderful for this.  You go under My Recipes and Create a recipe.  This allows you to put in the variety of ingredients and directions.  Then once you have the information, you can just manually enter your final recipes nutritional values into Caloriecount website.

Original Post by bianckino:

pleaser hlep I still cant find the recipe analazar.

 

Lucille

 Click on Foods then select New Recipe from the menu bar. 

Original Post by lbienia:

The only problem with the recipe analyzer is that I do not think it always looks for the most calorie correct food.  I have done it both ways...withthe analyzer and adding up each separate item.. I find that when I add each item, get a total and divide by the number of servings, the calorie count tends to be more accurate.

 You do have to check your ingredients to make sure that the ingredient you intended is what the analyzer picked.

I haven't found that to be so.  But then I use mostly fresh ingredients cooked from scratch.  Also, the way you enter the item is important.  If you, for instance, enter 1 can of College Inn low sodium chicken broth, it will be red flagged.  It needs to be a standard unit of measure too.  Enter it this way - 2 cups chicken broth, low sodium [105273]

The number is the item number for College Inn broth, lower sodium  It appears at the end of the address http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-colleg e-inn-light-fat-free-i105273

Once you get the hang of using the recipe analyzer, you'll never look back. 

If you are incorporating a lot of packaged ingredients in your recipes, then you might have problems.  In this case it's better to log them separately, then tag the whole group with one tag, such as My chicken soup.  Then the next time you can click on the down arrow next to the tag in your list of tagged items.  That will add the entire group to your log. 

I hope this helps!

I wanted to let you know that I can sometimes help with problem recipes if you will send me a personal message with a link to your recipe.  I don't always have time, so please be patient.

I have been using a program called "Mastercook".  It is a program that you can have on hand all the time to keep your own cookbook.  It does a really good job of analyzing recipes.

Original Post by amandief:

Robin (and/or everyone else)- I wonder if the problem could be because of not adding the numbers in brackets right next to the ingredient?

Let's pretend that Stop & Shop low fat cottage cheese has the exact or close to the same calories/protein, etc as your Great Value low fat cottage cheese so you would need to add numbers inside 2 brackets right next to the ingredient like so:

Low fat cottage cheese [112339]

You would find the number at the end of the url in your web broswer like this:

http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-stop-s hop-low-fat-cottage-i112339

It solved MOST of my problems but yes, sometimes I have to resort to paper or just keep in mind that the calories/nutrient ratio is off for that recipe.

I finally gave up when it wouldn't recognize garlic no matter how I tried to put it in there....  Salt and pepper seem to confuse it too.  

For tracking my food, I just get an estimate on a lot of foods and plug it in.  I cook almost everything and generally supplement my recipes on the fly.  I find something that is close and then adjust the servings accordingly to get as close as I can.  I know I eat much less sodium than gets recorded, because how I cook vs processed foods that are in the database, so for comparison sake I just keep that in mind.  (i.e. chili, chicken noodle soup, chicken and white bean soup, chicken and homemade whole wheat bread-I grind the wheat, etc...) Probably not great tracking, but it beats just giving up....

Original Post by linuxianfl:

I bought a GetSmart scale to help with issues like this.  It allows me to sum the calories and nutritional values of each ingredient as I add it to the mixing bowl or plate.  I've found this scale extremely helpful with portion control as well. 

 

Check out their Demo section on the web site.  They do a great job of showing you what it can do.  I ordered mine from Amazon.

http://www.eatsmartproducts.com/

How would this work for stuff not in the database, like home made stew?  Is there a way to save the nutrition info once and then access it later?  (Like adding my own recipe to the 999 food data base).

Thanks for the # tip on the recipe analyser.  I had just about given up on it after trying to get it to take fat free sour cream a bazillion times and it kept pulling up low fat sour cream...  Now that I know about the # assigned to each food, I will try using it again!!

I've been messing around with Recipe Analyzer for a while now, and I've found it's mostly all about how you put it in: Sour Cream, low-fat. Or Garlic, roasted, minced. First the main description and then the sub-description.

Of course, it doesn't always work. Frustrating.