Boxed meal points question.
 

I'm making Zatarains Dirty Rice mix, in which I added ground beef and ground sausage. The nutrition facts say 1 serving is 1 cup prepared, and it comes out to 3 pts- is that including the meat (directions on back only ask for ground beef)? Or do I need to somehow figure out the meat points as well? Which is going to be dang hard now that it's all fried up and mixed in with the rice.

The nutritional value on the back of boxes (that I know of) ONLY includes what is actually IN the box. There may even be fine print somewhere on the box around the nutritional information that specifies that it's for the mix in the box only and not the meat.

Those 3 points would not be including the meat, just for the rice mix.

Do you remember how much meat it said to put in? How much you used?

You can still figure it out if you weighed it or measured it before you put it in. You'll just have to divide the meat you used by the number of servings there are in the box.

I searched the box and no fine print- I was hoping there would be, and it's why I'm confuzzled. The only thing it says is: "Serving Size 3 Tbsp (38.0 g) 1 cup prepared". A prepared box- following the recipe- has 1 lb browned ground beef. I made 3 boxes w/ 1 lb ground beef, 2 lbs ground sausage. And I left out the optional oil, which would mess with the points, too... goodness! So I should assume the 3 pts are for the rice mix only, and then guesstimate how much meat was in there? If I had 1 cup of dirty rice, I'm sure the meat portion couldn't have been more than 1/8- 1/4 cup. Or does the fact that it says "1 cup prepared" include, at least, the 1 lb ground beef? How in the world would they take into consideration if someone used the optional oil... or if they used 7, 15, 20% fat meat, etc.

I'm so glad I don't make this kind of stuff very often. :\

Even if there's no fine print, I'd say stay on the safer side of things and consider that the nutritional value is ONLY for what's in the box.

So how many servings were in a box? I'm gonna do some quick pretend math.

You made three boxes, I'll pretend there are 4 servings per box. That's 12 servings total for the rice mix.

So you then added in 1 lb of ground beef & 2 lbs ground sausage. I don't know how lean your ground beef was so for fake math purposes I'm going with 20 points per lb. And for the ground sausage - well... general purpose Italian sausage is about 40 points a lb. If you used two pounds of ground Italian sausage that's 80 points.

So for the after math: That's 100 points of meat divided by 12 servings.

That's another 8-9 points per cup. I usually go with the higher. So, all told that's 9 points for the meat, plus 3 points for the rice.

That's 12 points per cup of rice mix plus the meat you added.

(The original would be: 1 box rice mix = 3 points with 4 servings in box. 1 pound ground beef would be 20 lbs divided by 4 servings. All told that is 8 points per cup of the rice mix plus ground beef.)

Holy cow, Lovely, you rock! I estimated, without counting the literal points, my 1 cup serving at 12 pts- I can't believe you came up with the same (approximate) math! Overall, that's not terribly horrible considering that's all I ate for dinner with a bunch of steamed cauliflower- and I was full before I ate the last quarter cup, or so. And I can verify, the low-sodium Dirty Rice is REALLY YUMMY. :) Although it does have MSG (for those who are MSG-sensitive).

:rofl: Ha ha! I do like rice/pasta + meat mixes. Especially with sides of veggies. It's really not bad for a whole meal!