I have always loved cooking, but tracking has always stressed me out. Serving sizes are very confusing as well. I was feeling very confident because this is my first big batch that I’ve made with servings in mind. Ever since I started meal prepping i have avoided rice and pasta, but I’ve been craving spaghetti like a mad woman. I figured out a recipe and a serving size and weighed everything. I was so proud of myself for making my own thing and adding better ingredients…Now I’m upset and weirdly stressed because I wrote down the dry weight of the pasta but when I weighed everything I didn’t weigh the pasta by itself wet. Only the finished project w the sauce 😭. Ik it doesn’t matter calorie wise, but does it mean that I need to eat less? That what I have is inaccurate? Idk who is boiling one serving of pasta at a time so there has to be a way. Or should I focus on the servings? And as long as it’s divided p evenly by the 13.5 ( bc 13.7857143 was stressing me out and they wouldn’t let me add the decimals; and I can’t simplify it; and if I rounded up idk how much of a cup that is, so if you know that please help. Or lmk if you’d do the same. I stopped being good at math around more complex fractions 💀) it would be easier if I wasn’t sharing with my family and I could put it in 7 different containers but I don’t have the space. I tried googling it and it stressed me out even more because they started doing multiplication and it didn’t help me figure out how to track it. I just want to know is 13.5 oz close to 439 calories ??
by Right_Teaching_8193
5 Comments
Also, w the raw veggies or meat do you weigh it again after cooking it? I just realized I put down the zucchini and the carrots as sautéed bc I did, but I didn’t do that w the beef and I didn’t record the zucchini and carrots after I cooked them. I just threw them in the blender w the sauce
Usually it’s best to weigh raw ingredients, unless the nutrition information specifically mentions “cooked”. You can weigh the entire thing before cooking and then when you take, say, half for your portion, log half of the uncooked amount
In loseit you can create a meal for this situation instead of doing the math yourself. Go to add and scroll down to other options and click create recipe. Add all the ingredients by raw weight here. In your recipe you said you weighed the raw veggies but logged them as sautéed. That’s skewing your numbers, as 5.5oz of raw carrot is 55 calories instead of 132 for sautéed.
After you add in all your ingredients cook as normal and weigh out the final weight AFTER it’s cooked. Add this weight into total recipe size. Then scroll down to serving size. So if the entire meal weighs 1000 grams and you want 250 grams per serving you log this here. Save your recipe and you can now log this easily by just clicking recipes when you go to log food. You can adjust your portion size here too.
Most pasta packets will (annoyingly) give nutrition for cooked weight but they will indicate a rough conversion. E.g. 75g dry pasta typically produces 180g of cooked pasta. So 75/180 = 2.4. So if you weighed 392 dry, times it by 2.4 and you get your 940g cooked weight.
See if your pasta suggests a conversion and use that. Mine is a basic pasta conversion, your protein pasta might be different.
>Idk who is boiling one serving of pasta at a time
I do! You can’t trust the cooked weight of pasta, because you have no idea how much water was absorbed. So the “wet” weight is useless.
Always weigh your pasta before adding it to the boiling water. And yes, you totally can cook 1 serving of pasta at a time. I do it all the time, because I LOVE pasta and can’t control myself, I will eat the entire pot lol.
So weigh out ONE serving of pasta, dry weight, and cook it. That’s it. If you’re cooking more than one portion because you’re cooking for several people, weigh it beforehand, and weigh it after cooking. Then divide both weights into how many portions you are making.