I have a hard time deciding how to count points or calories for my dinners. I am queen of the casserole! With a family of 5 and limited food budget. I love 1 pot meals. Like today, I got 2 lbs. of chuck steak. Instead of using it as steak, I chopped it up and put in pot with potatoes and a bunch of veggies. That way I can get 1 dinner and probably a couple of lunches for hubby out of a small amount of meat. Today's I can probably separate out and figure it. But often times I can't it, how do you all do it. Its even hard to add it all up and divide by portions, because I'm a throw together kind of cook. So I don't usually know what I am going to end up with. Am I the only one with this dilemma!

I write it down as I'm making it and figure it out later when I'm at the pc. But normally, I know what I'm working with.

Spark Recipes. Input each ingredient of your dish and then determine how many servings are in it. It then gives you a nutritional breakdown of one serving of the dish.

I absolutely love cooking casseroles and one dish meals. If I'm not using any online aids and only figuring it out on pen/paper, What I usually do to figure it out is....

1) Take all my ingredients and figure out how many servings of each I'm going to add.

So For example if I'm going to add a full 540ml can of pasta sauce, and the serving size is 1/2 cup (125ml). I would divide 540 by 125 which would give me 4.32 servings going into the dinner. Then I multiply the amount of servings by the calories per serving.. So if 1 serving of pasta sauce is 50 calories, the total calories for the pasta sauce is 216.

2) Once I have all my totals from all my ingredients, I add them all together.

3) When the meal is done cooking I dish it all out into plates/leftover containers (In equal amounts, or at least try to get as close as I can) And depending on how many containers I filled up, I would just divide my total calories by the number of containers. And I then know how many calories each container is

I hope this post was a bit helpful! I apologize if it doesn't make a lot of sense, I'm sometimes really bad at explaining myself.

I'm with you on this. I'm a "just throw it in!" kind of cook too, and I make alot of one pot meals. I use Spark Recipies to figure the calorie counts, but my main struggle is figuring out how many servings are in the dish. For example, I may know that one cup equals one serving. But I am not good AT ALL in estimating the amount of cups in any of my dishes.

I have no advice that hasn't been given (since I have a similar problem), but I always think it's best to estimate a low number of servings so that the calories counts are actually less than estimated per serving.

Good luck!

I like the ease of crockpot or on dish meals too. The danger is that it is easy to overeat and lose sense of portions. I've not tried an online calculator. I actally calculate the amount for the entire recipe. I actually write it on the recipe page itself so I don't have to recalculate it every time. Then I figure out how many servings are in the dish and divide the total. If it is a casserole or "solid" one dish meal I actually divide it into servings before serving the meal. It is hard to guess what 1/6th of a lasagna looks like after some has been eaten and the leftovers are packed in different containers. If it's liquidy I will put 6 equal amounts ( if there are 6 total servings) into seperately bowls, serve what will be eaten, and put the rest away in individual serving size containers.