[Lula Belle]

Yesterday I had a really productive (food-wise) day. I made homemade tahini and hummus, baked sandwich bread, and made homemade pizzas (including the crust).

I love calorie counting, it keeps me accountable for what I eat, and when I know that I'm going to have to log some really high amount for food I wasn't really hungry for, it is a huge motivation booster for me to just say "no".

What I don't love is endless math and calculations to figure out the calories for homemade servings of food that are more complicated that just chicken and rice. (I weigh every ingredient as I go, and then I weigh the whole recipe when I'm done to get an idea of calories per gram.)

So I marinated chicken with some brown sugar and olive oil... Does that add many calories? How do I quantify it?

So I baked bread... About half a cup (or more) of the recipe's flour was left on the countertop, how do I measure the calories in my recipe?

I made hummus and a lot of the batch was stuck in the blender, how much was that?

These questions frustrate me and although each one alone is fairly simple to solve with just a little estimating and such, when I have to make three, four, five calculations like this every day, plus entering loooong recipes into clumsy programs to figure out the nutrients in my food per gram, I just end up exhausted.

I know that there are large calorie differences per volume of bread depending on the method you use, the type of bread you bake, the amount of air in the crumb... So "eyeballing" the calories is sure to cause me to overestimate. Water is much heavier than flour, so weighing a more moist bread and guesstimating the calories will probably do that as well. Or maybe not.

I guess I'm just a bit of a perfectionist about this stuff, but I won't give up cooking most of my meals completely from scratch. I know it is healthier and tastier. I just don't have a nutrition facts label for any of it.

Does anyone have any advice for me? Are there any websites or programs you recommend that are better suited for analyzing recipes? (I use caloriecount, but their recipe setup is just terrible. Livestrong is better for recipes but doesn't track as many vitamins and minerals.)

I'm just kind of discouraged. I feel like when I'm doing what's healthier more economical for my family (cooking at home from scratch), I'm also sabotaging my ability to count calories without spending hours a day logging recipes.

[boomerang]

Lulla Belle, I understand your compulsion to track everything. I do the same. This suggestion may not work for you but this is what I do: when I have something that is left over that cannot be measured/weighted, (and subtracted from the total), I add the remaining ingredients to something that may be appropriate. For example, if I have something left in the blender that can be used in a soup or stew, I add water to the blender until I can remove the ingredients and add it to a a soup. Same goes for anything that can be added to oatmeal or a shake, etc.
This is my first post (after long absence) so I will stop here to see if I am doing it right.

[kelly315]

I write up the calories of each ingredient I put into my cooking, then divide the food up into portions to eat the rest of the week. For example, if I marinated the chicken with brown sugar and olive oil like you did, then I would count every calorie in that marinade. If some of it remained in the pan or bowl, etc, I would scoop it back on top of the chicken and eat it. It helps if you plan ahead, and use as much of each ingredient as you're actually willing to eat.

As far as food left in bowls or blenders, I just scrape it out. I have a nice rubbery scraper which removes 95+% from surfaces.