I'm unsure how to count calories in foods you make yourself. My mom is making a crockpot beef stew for dinner, but I have no idea how to log that on Daily Plate. Any suggestions?

You have to add calories for all ingredients and then divide the total by the number of servings. E.g. 800 cal / 8 servings = 100 cal/serving.

I use the daily plate too and many times I'll search "beef stew" and when the results come up, I check the "only recipes" box and then read through them and see if I can find a recipe similar to mine. I don't follow traditional recipes and just sort of toss stuff in a pot so I try and find a recipe that has the same stuff I toss in mine.

Or you can go http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php there and enter in your mom's recipe and see what comes up. THen take that caloric figure and enter it as a generic calorie item on the daily plate or find a beef stew recipe there that has approx the same caloric value as your moms and just use that even if the ingredients are different because all you are after is the number of calories.

*blinks* No idea how many servings mom put of anything into it. I just know it's carrots, green peppers, celery, potatoes, meat, and I think tomato juice. Juice, not paste or sauce. And some parsley flakes and two bay leaves. Other than that.... No idea..

Pretty hard to count calories if you don't know how much there is or how many servings it will be.

I know. But seeing as she does the cooking, not much I can do. Although as long as I don't eat a lot, I should be okay. It's about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I've not even eaten 600 calories yet today.

I have a subscription to Fitwatch.com that lets me build and save recipes, along with a lot of other good things. It's only $4.95 per month. I know Weight Watchers online has the same feature, but they cost way more.

I would probably just find a beef stew recipe on the daily plate that has similar ingredients and go with that.

That's exactly what I do. Homemade food, especially if someone else is making is, is always going to be something of an estimate. Put down your best guess. And understand that if you eat a big ole bowl of whatever you mom is cooking, you might very well be eating more than one serving of the food as you log it.

I understand how hard it can be. When I first started calorie counting I had trouble calculating my own meals and I prepared them myself. I would also suggest finding a similar recipe online and going by that. In the future, if you want to calculate a recipe you can use nutritiondata (.com) It's a free site where you can create recipes and have them analyzed. It can be time consuming but once you have a recipe entered you don't have to do it again. Maybe next time you can ask to help your mom and just throw everything in a measuring cup before adding it to the pot
I would ballpark a regular soup bowl of the stew at around 350 calories depending on what she used to thicken it. Most recipes for soups and chilis with similar ingredients are around 300 - 400 for a large bowl.

I hope that is helpful

Amanda