[NiteNicole]

I make a soup that I have for lunch almost every day. It's super easy and packed with all kinds of good stuff, it's filling, and I actually like it. It's also easy to change up the ingredients slightly if I have more of one thing or less of another. I make a big pot on Monday and then have it every day till I run out - which isn't as long as you might think because my husband and daughter also like it.

My question is, what's the easiest way for me to figure out how many calories in a cup? Is there a free recipe builder anywhere online, or do I need to just suck it up and do it by hand?

[Kukkie84]

I think there's a recipe builder thing on sparkpeople.

[NiteNicole]

Thank you, I'll check there. I have googled but none of them seem to be what I'm actually looking for. I'll check Sparkpeople.

[sweetnlow28]

I use two calculators, spark for solid dishes that can easily be divided, and nutritiondata for things like soups where you would like a weight per serving. If you don't weigh your foods then sparkrecipes calculator would be fine to "ballpark" a serving. You can estimate how many servings per pot then input the ingredients.
Here is the spark calculator. Its awesome, but doesn't give you the weight per serving:
http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

Here is the link for nutrition data. It is more time consuming because you need to weigh every ingredient in the soup including water. I find it great though because the end result will tell you exactly what a serving weighs so you will know how much to eat. You can save the recipe and just adjust it when you add a new ingredient to your soup recipe.
http://nutritiondata.self.com/mynd/m...mynd/myrecipes