What do you do to properly count calories for home-made food?

I've been using the CC tool for a while now, but I always end up straying off because I run into this problem: I cook most of my lunch/dinner-meals (shrimp w/ veggies, eggplant parm, panko friend fish, etc) and I don't know how to really track that since I usually split the meal with my bf AND the quantities in things can vary and not be really measured, etc. 

For example, today I ate some homemade 31/40 shrimp (I counted ~24) with mixed veggies and I used plum sauce for some flavor, as well as olive oil to cook it.  How do I really quantify all of that?  Or do I just stick to the big ones (in this case, shrimp?).

I just need to hear how other successful dieters track their calories when they do home-made meals that aren't straight out of a box.. anyone out there with ideas or strategies?

I usually just guestimate. You're not always going to get your calorie intake for the day exactly right, unless you are super anal about it and have a food scale and count out exact portions. In my opinion, that is way too time consuming and I would rather enjoy my food than worry about every teensy weensy amount of calories that I may be eating.

Calorie count's recipe calculator doesn't help me out much, but I found one that seems to work better for me. It's always worth a try and if all else fails, just make sure that you're consuming healthy calories instead of the super fattening ones. Hope this helps somewhat.

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calcula tor.asp

hm! I didn't even know there was a recipe calculator, so, yes, that helps.. a ton!

First things first: Make sure you have a food scale, measureing cups, and spoons.

I cook for others quite a bit, so here's what I do:

I weigh and measure everything (no matter who is eating).  If cooking for 2, I add everything up and divide by 2 (duh).  If I plan on having leftovers I divide that by 2 also.

The key is measuring everything. I do it every singe day, at least twice a day.  It's really easy if you keep a calculator, pen and paper next to your stove and scale. It's not time consuming, bc you're already in the kitchen doing everything. It's just like writing a recipe as you go. I think of myself as more of chef then a calorie counter.

98% of everything I eat is made in my kitchen from raw, whole ingredients.  I have a scale and measuring cups/spoons.  I weigh/measure everything that goes into each recipe and write it down on a pad of paper that I keep in the kitchen for that purpose.  Then I look everything up on CC, add up the calories, and divide the total by the number of servings.  (I don't use the Recipe Analyzer because I'm not sure how accurate it is.)   

The recipe analyzer is awesome.  It does exactly what you're doing on paper - and it even lets you check its work if you're worried about it.  You enter the exact quantities of each ingredient plus the total number of portions.  It pulls the calories/ingredient info. from the database (and you can click on each ingredient to check that it picked the right one, or change it if it picked the wrong kind of rice, for example), adds it all up and divides by the number of portions.  SO much less work.  I often use it to enter salads too because it's faster than looking up each individual salad component.

I cook most of my meals and a small kitchen scale is very helpful in this case. Makes things easy to add to the food log, like for example 80g raw rice + 120g mussels + 140g tomato, +20g garlic. I don't count the parsley, lemon juice and the curry powder condiment, they're 10 cals at most.

Usually I only make one serving, I like my food freshly cooked.

I also use a food scale and measuring cups and spoons ; I count everything that goes into the meal, then I divide that total number by the number of servings. The recipe calculator is great, but I just pen and paper in the kitchen as I cook. i cna't say it's completely accurate, but I'm guessing it's a very close estimate.

add up all the calories, then divide it by how many servings. good luck!

I often use the recipe analyser, too. The only problem I've run into is that some items are only shown in specific measurements, not as a basic item. For instance, if the recipe calls for one medium shallot, the analyser has problems because it only measures them in teaspoons. It's not much of a problem once I know which items are measured that way, but sometimes it catches me by surprise when I've already cooked the meal and didn't take time to measure the exact amount.

Regards,

Patricia

Personally I have found the recipe analyzer to drive me to distraction as I always have ingredients it can't recognise so I tend to just add the individual items and make sure when I add them that I use a tablespoon to measure ie for spices and oil etc.  I might end up with a list of 12 ingredients under my dinner section but it only takes me around 5 mins and I save the ingredients with special tags so that next time I just go to my tagged food page, open the tagged item in a new window and add them one after the other. 

I must admit that I have become more ingredient conscious in my cooking and will sometimes simplify meals just to make it less time consuming to enter it in the journal, nothing major but might just cut a herb out here or there.

Tags are a life saver for me!

Original Post by lisajb74:

Personally I have found the recipe analyzer to drive me to distraction as I always have ingredients it can't recognise so I tend to just add the individual items and make sure when I add them that I use a tablespoon to measure ie for spices and oil etc.  I might end up with a list of 12 ingredients under my dinner section but it only takes me around 5 mins and I save the ingredients with special tags so that next time I just go to my tagged food page, open the tagged item in a new window and add them one after the other. 

I must admit that I have become more ingredient conscious in my cooking and will sometimes simplify meals just to make it less time consuming to enter it in the journal, nothing major but might just cut a herb out here or there.

Tags are a life saver for me!

 I love the tags too, you can also give items that go into a recipe the same tag lable, and enter multiple items at once this way.    So I tag all of my items for tuna salad, for example, each as "tuna salad" and it saves all the items together in one tag- just hit the + one time to add everything to your food log.   It's very handy for things I eat frequently like salad and smoothies.