Measuring portions of cooked food
 

So you have a pot of couscous which you've prepared according to the directions on the package. You've made 4 portions with 100 calories per portion.

How the heck do you measure out one portion without the food going cold?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I think I'm eating way more than one portion of stuff at dinner but I can't seem to figure out a measuring system that's quick and easy.

Dagmar

Honestly, I estimate. If I know I've cooked 4 portions, I find it is sufficient to divide the pot in quarters.

With couscous, I run a knife across to mark my pot into fourths, then scoop from each quadrant to get a portion.

My partner and I are the only ones who eat these meals, and we eat them again for lunch the next day, so as long as I am moderately accurate, the calories all seem to balance out (ie, if I take a bit too much at dinner, I get a bit less the next day at lunch).

I do the same thing with cooked meats. If I know I bought a 1 lb pork tenderloin, and then divided it into 4 portions that are the same number of slices, and the slices are all approx the same thickness, I'm calling each portion 4 oz raw.

Haven't tried this personally, though it may be a good idea: I know there are special dishes you can buy that hold a certain amount of food, so you always know how much you're eating. I remember seeing them on DailyCandy or FitSugar or one of those... they look like pretty designs on the dishes, but the designs actually mean how many cups or whatever it is. If you're interested let me know and I'll spend some time trying to figure out exactly where I saw them, because it was at least a year ago so I don't remember offhand.

Thanks for the suggestion!
 

I'll try the drawing lines across the food - should work fine with couscous and rice. My partner and I also eat 4 portion meals for two nights so that should balance out the servings. And that should work for pasta as well. Whatever I'm over the night before will balance out the next day. :p

Dagmar :dance: (the dancing potato??)

Hey dagmar,

I have a flat battery operated scale.....Although I must admit I haven't been using it lately. When I do ...I put the empty dinner plate right on the scale, zero it, then start loading up. So if I want half cup of rice, then I put 4 oz on. Then a zero the scale again and put the meat on etc. If you have a small scale this works best if you don't use too large of a plate or is clear glass so you can see the numbers.


Hope this is helpful.

rswlchic - The scale method would work with meat, but not with things you are trying to measure by volume (ie, 1/2 cup rice). 1/2 cup of rice doesn't equal 4 ounces by weight, though it does by volume.

Scale ounces are a whole different entity than liquid ounces!

I usually measure a half cup of couscous or rice and consider it a portion, unless otherwise stated on the container that a portion is a 1/3 cup or something like that...

I usually use Mandalinn's method of drawing a line to divide the food into however many portions it is supposed to be.

The only food this doesn't really work well with is soups and stews. Those I just eyeball and try to err on the conservative side the first night so that I'm not gypping us the second night (there's two of us, so if something makes four portions, we have it again for dinner the next night). We use the same soup bowls all the time and I make enough soup/stews that I know about how high to fill them to equal one portion. I figure that so long as I keep both of our portions about equal, the calories all balance out if I eat a little less the first night and a little more the second night. Because I'm always adding veggies and other ingredients, sometimes when I've measured out all the soup portions (I typically store leftovers in single-serving containers using my standard soup bowl to measure them out), I'll discover that it came out to five portions instead of four. I count this as a pleasant surprise, adjust my calories for the day, sometimes eat something else if the calories came in really low and I'm still hungry, and note on the recipe that it is five portions instead of four.

If I'm feeling really anal about it, I will weigh and measure the portions. Usually the way I do this is by first weighing the entire amount of food the recipe made in grams. Then I divide that amount by however many servings the recipe is supposed to make, then measure out the individual portions. Alternatively, I'll pick out four containers (assuming the recipe made four portions) that all weigh the same and divide the food into each, weighing each to make sure they all weigh the same amount. I'm more likely to use the second method when I'm not eating any of the portions right away. My SO has suggested that this behavior is excessively obsessive :crazy:, so I only do it if 1) in the case of the first method, I have a bowl or pan left from preparing the meal that I can dump all the food into to weigh it (I refuse to dirty an extra pan to weigh my food) and 2) My SO isn't around or likely to walk into the kitchen while I'm doing it.