How Many Calories Are in my Recipe?

This New Year I decided to just have a few New Year’s resolutions so that I would most likely stick to them. One of them is to eat better.

I realized that last year my eating was pretty poor. I didn’t eat lots of junk food or anything; instead I ate nutritionally poor foods like bread instead of veggies. Some days my meals were toast, toast, and more toast; or toast, a Panini, a burrito – not a lot of veggies there at all.

My slow cooker, my trusted friend from West Bend, decided to molt its Teflon coat so I decided that I didn’t need to eat micro pieces of Teflon and I binned it. My error then was not to replace it. I slowly forgot how a slow cooker had been the main work horse in my kitchen, I guess in part due to the carb induced amnesia I was under! But something pushed me to get another one over the holidays and I am so glad I did.

I am now the happy owner of a 6 quart Set ‘n’ Forget slow cooker by Hamilton Beech. I have to say it rocks! It’s pretty huge but it looks very contemporary and it’s stylish enough to keep out on the countertop all the time.

Since getting it I have cooked curry, soup, chili and seasoned ground beef to add to a ton of recipes. I’ve cooked in such large batches that the freezer is starting to get filled again and I am so happy [it doesn’t take much, does it?]

My plan is to have plenty of high quality prepared meals in the refrigerator and freezer that I am not tempted by snacks, or bread!

But now on to why I am actually posting today. I thought I would simply calculate the calories of the curry I made last night so that I can track my calorie consumption at sparkpeople.com [which is the only website I have used to this, on and off, for about four years now.]

It sounds simple: add up the calories and then divide by the 10 servings I made to get a serving to be listed under ‘lunch’ today. Well simple it was not. Boy, sometimes I think the old ways work better. I used to get out my calorie book and write all the ingredients down in a notebook, then get the calculator out, and voila.

So sparkpeople.com lets you manually add foods that you eat that aren’t in their database, but I had a recipe I was following so I couldn’t add that – but I could add a food grouping. I added all the items into a food group and saw that the ten servings added up to around 1500 cals. Great – a serving would be a mere 150 calories.

Then I went into the food tracker screen and added 0.1 of my food group, as that’s my serving size for lunch. Lo and behold all the ten items from my food group then appeared under ‘lunch,’ instead of just the group item’s name. Crap.

Google was my next stop. I looked for ‘how to calculate the calories in my recipe’ and stopped off at a few sites but none of them helped me in my quest. Recipecal.com wanted me to sign up [which is fair but I didn’t want to]; fitwatch.com didn’t have the units that I had used for different items among their recipe analyzer so that didn’t work – where I had used my ounces scale they had listed cups and I didn’t want to google for a conversion calculator; finding just a plain boiled potato listing in caloriedatabase.com was a pain; and finally at theofficediet.com I downloaded an excel spreadsheet to help me but it was for grams, and again I didn’t want to convert.

I was about to lose my mind: my calorie counting book was nowhere to be found – had I thrown it out with the Teflon peeling slow cooker last year? I have no clue. All I know is that manual calculation was not an option at this point.

Google then lead me to sparkrecipes.com, by none other than my trusted sparkpeople. Bingo! I filled out all the details and hit the button to calculate the nutrition info for my one serving. It read 394.1! What? When I did the food grouping I got 150. I then had to go through the ingredients to see where the error was coming from. In the end it was that darned sneaky mango chutney! For some reason it was showing up as coconut oil and so the numbers were totally skewed.

Then I looked for the button to let me import the data into my food tracker, but I couldn’t find one! What? These are the same people, right? The spark people? There must be some way to be able to import this information, but I couldn’t find it, so I manually entered the data into my food tracker.

Finally, after about 40 minutes, I was able to select one serving of my homemade veggie curry!
The lesson I take away from this complete and utter rigmarole is to go out and buy a calorie book today. If you cook and calculate the calories in your recipes let me know how you do it, I’d love to hear from you!