Counting Calories - homemade food

Hi everyone, I am new to this forum but not new to dieting. The problem I am having now is that I don't eat allot of pre packaged food. How do you count calories on say a casserole that someone else has made. I don't do the cooking in my house my husband does. I am OK with Breakfast and lunch but dinner is so hard for me to calculate. Any ideas?

plug all the ingredients into the recipe analyzer tool. follow the intructions and estimate number of portions per entire recipe.

the tool has worked well for me.

I use that tool too, it is great.  You can save the recipe for next time you have it.

Make sure your husband weighs out the ingredients in his dishes so that you get an accurate reflection in the calories when you use the recipe analyser.  2 tablespoons of olive oil in a dish will give you a vastly different calorie count to 2 teaspoons.

One of the things I do because Recipe analyzer doesn't always work for me is this.

 

1. weigh Each ingredient

2. Calculate calorie content for each ingredient

3.Weight the entire casserole (minus the dish)

4. Divide that number by the number of servings you want...I usually use 4 or 6.

For example..I have a caserole that totals 1300 cals for the entire dish. All the ingredients together weighs 24ozs.  I divide 24 by 4 (6ozs) and 1300 by 4 (325 cals) So for this casserole there's approximately 325 calories per 6 ounce serving. 

Denise

Thanks, I don't think I will get my husband to weigh each ingredient so I will just have to be very careful how many calories I take in during the day and limit my portions. 

My husband loses weight just by siting too long...I am the complete opposite.  He is very supportive but really has no idea how hard it is to take off lbs. 

 

I take the ingredients and put them in an excel file and calculate all my totals. Then tag it in cc.

 

 

I use excel for some recipes..but I am notorious for NOT doing the recipe the same way twice.

Excel would definaly work for me!  thanks for the suggestions  

you know what i do.  I just put all the ingredients in one by one in calorie counter and estimate how much of each ingredient I eat.  For example if in my house for dinner there is top sirloin beef cooked in a chipotle chile sauce than I just put in the amount of top sirloin beef and whatever I believe the serving of the chipotle pepper is.  I guess a lot but I have too.   A lot of the food I eat isn't in the database.  I live in Mexico and the food is really different.  Pre packaged is not big in Mexico so most of the things I eat are homemade.  It gets easier.  If you have a food scale dedicate an evening to weighing things so that you can get an idea of how much a serving is and than in the future you can basically just look at your food and know how many servings you are eating.  It takes practice don't get frustrated it gets easier every day.