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Permalink Reply by Zoe on April 18, 2011 at 9:56am

Calorieking.com is great! Also, what I do is once I've calculated the recipe, I then mark it up with the carbs so next time I eat that same dish it's already there!

Also, the way I do it is I measure as I go. So, say when I get the mushrooms ready to go, I toss them first in my measuring cup..ok, 2 cups of mushrooms to be cooked = 20 carbs. (regular vegies are easy: 1/2 c cooked is 5 carbs , 1 C uncooked is 5 carbs.). Then I add all the ingredients up and divide by the number of servings. After awhile it gets automatic. Like I eat a lot of salads and I know that my salad bowl I eat from = 2 cups (uncooked) vegies, so unless I add something higher carb, like say garbanzo beans my salads are always 10 carbs.

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Permalink Reply by Brian (bsc) on April 18, 2011 at 9:58am

If you are cooking from a recipe with routine ingredients, you may find the recipe calculator at about.com helpful. Just paste the ingredient list into the text field and calculate. Any ingredients not found are flagged.

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Permalink Reply by BadMoonT2 on April 18, 2011 at 10:26am

A scale like the "EatSmart" can be useful too. You put an item on the scale and punch in a code and it gives you nutrient counts including carbs, fiber, protein, fat etc. It has a useful feature where you can set it to remember the previous item and when a new item is added it keeps a running total. Divide by servings and your done.

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Permalink Reply by LiL MaMa on April 18, 2011 at 2:56pm

I use livestrong.com multiple times a day.

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Permalink Reply by lindanu on April 18, 2011 at 3:10pm

I would get a carb counter book. We bought this http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001Q5DYL0 and love it. It's a scale but come with a carb mulitplier book. Once you start using multipliers everything gets easier. If you make certain dishes all the time, then you only need to determine the multiplier once, then you weigh the portion and multiply by the multiplier and that is the number of carbs. Seconds??? no problem, scoop some more up and calculate again. Full? Can't finish? No problem, stick what is left on the plate and multiply and subtract. Easy! The book it comes with comes with basic items, but there is a place in the back where you can put your own multipliers for the foods you eat the most.

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Permalink Reply by Kari on April 18, 2011 at 4:47pm

I use myfitnesspal.com (I'm interested in counting calories for weight loss, but you don't have to use it for that purpose), and there's a great recipes tool where you add all the ingredients, amount of each ingredient, then tell how many servings the whole thing makes and it gives you all the nutritional information. You can save your recipe for further use. The cool part is that if your daughter eats less than/more than a serving, you just enter how much (for example if 1 cup is a serving and she eats 1 1/4 cups, you'd say she ate 1.25 servings) and it recalculates for you.

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