Home cooked food

[LillyLeaf]

How do I work out calories from home cooking. For example I made a huge batch of roasted veg and lentil soup for lunches, how on earth do I know how many calories is in that? Same with dinners, I often make huge batches of veg chilli or veg curry.

[maxelly]

So I do one of two things. Either I make a rough guestimate in my head (so I know veg and lentil soup if not made with any cream or huge amounts of oil/butter will be roughly 200-250 per serving). I know this because the veg will be 25-50 a portion, depending on what it is, count 2 portions of veg per serving, plus say 25-50 for the oil you roasted the veg in (less if you use Frylight or similar, more if you used a lot), and 75-100 for the lentils depending on how many you put in...

I use MyFitnessPal so I'd then just search 'carrot and lentil soup' or whatever and pick the result that comes out at about 250 cals. I tend to slightly overestimate as a safety factor. The macros are rarely 100% correct but hey ho.

For more complex recipes or ones I cook a lot, I use the recipe maker function on MFP, which lets you input all the ingredients and how many portions, then works out the cals for you. It's a bit of a faff but once you've done it once the recipe is saved forever. It also has an automatic uploader if your recipe is online although it doesn't always work perfectly! You could use a tool like this if you want to be more accurate?

[LillyLeaf]

Thanks I'll give that a go, I didn't know about the recipe tool, that will absolutely help as the food I usually batch cook is the same 5ish recipes.

[0DimSumMum0]

I've just started using this site for meals cooked from scratch at home. I've found it quite useful so far. You put all of your ingredients in and it calculates the meal per portion.
www.verywellfit.com/recipe-nutrition-analyzer-4157076