I want to cook more at home, it is something I enjoy, and I think will bring more fulfillment when it comes to my eating. HOWEVER! I cannot figure out how to calculate how many calories are in the dishes I cook. A not so healthy example is tonight I am making Chicken Alfredo Lasagna for my parents. The chicken is chopped, grilled in honey, and then added to a pan that contains: whole wheat lasagna noodles, spinach, lemon thyme, cheese, garlic, and Alfredo sauce. I'm not going to eat any of it, because I cannot figure out how many calories are in a slice... but I don't want to be limited to prepackaged foods because I am math challenged here. ^-^ Thanks everyone!
Generally Alfredo sauce is loaded with fat and calories, so you're probably better off skipping this meal!
Have you tried getting recipes from cookinglight.com? They have wonderful recipes and if you follow them correctly (correct measuring of ingredients) then you're can be assured that the calorie count at the end of every recipe is correct.
If you don't want to do that, you can plug in your ingredients into the recipe analyzer at calorie-count.com and get a pretty good idea of the calories per serving. Otherwise you'd have to look up each ingredient that you add to the recipe, add it all up and divide by the number of servings. It's work but it is completely "doable."
I'm an avid home cook, and I use DailyPlate.com to count all my calories. So far it's my favorite site/software because it lets you use custom ingredients (e.g. if I use low-sodium or low-fat or healthy brand something, I want it to reflect that rather than use a generic ingredient). You put in each of the ingredients and the number of portions the recipe made, and that's it! You can also save the recipes, so if you're like me and often have leftovers or make the same things over and over, you can go back to it without having to input all the ingredients again.
That is what I love about fit day. You can add your own things in. I make something like meatloaf. I make it the same way everytime. I added everything in the meatloaf and then put meatloaf in my fitday. Now anytime I make that for dinner. I just have to click meatloaf .
calorie-count.com has a great recipe analyzer under their tools area. I either use that or I plug everything into fitday (one day ahead for a clean slate) and then divide by the amount of servings.
I also try to use recipes that have the calorie counts there. But since I like to improvise I use the recipe analyzer more often.
I generally use the calorie-count analyzer to get a general sense of the recipe. However, I usually find that it's 200-600 calories higher per serving than what I actually make. When I put most recipes in, I often see 1000 cals/serving, which is so scary! However, once I start taking out the ingredients I know that are often wrong (like - it always has a ridiculously high number for chicken broth, whereas I use Swanson Natural Goodness which is fat-free and reduced sodium, coming in at 20 cals/cup), I get a more realistic picture.
Basically, I use calorie-count to decide if something is worth making/modifying, and then DailyPlate to actually count the totals.
1,2,5,6,7 - Counting challenged in home cooking.
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