Great Website for Calorie Counters

One of my favorite recipe websites is Allrecipes.com.  I've found many wonderful recipes there, and some have become favorites that I make over and over.  But one drawback of their website is that not all recipes have nutritional information, and there's no nutritional calculator if you're submitting a recipe of your own.

When I started keeping close track of my calorie intake, I searched for a recipe calculator I could use for things like cookbook recipes and the meals I get from my monthly Make Ahead Meal group (ooh, future blog post!).  I found one on SparkRecipes.  It's a website with a huge database of health-focused recipes.  Not every recipe is low in calories or fat, but the primary focus is to provide recipes for people who are looking for healthier choices.  They have recipes in the Dietary Needs categories of Vegetarian, Vegan, Lactose Free, Gluten Free, Low Fat, Low Carb and Sugar Free.  To give you an idea of how many recipes you can find, there are 3,898 recipes in the Gluten Free category and 2,110 in Lactose Free, to name just those two.

In addition to having a big storehouse of recipes, all with nutritional information, you can also use their Recipe Calculator to enter ingredients and find out how many calories, fat, carbs, etc. are in each serving of a dish.

There's a database of ingredients to use, but you are also able to add those ingredients that you can't find, provided you have the nutritional information from their packaging.  That information is then available for other people who use the calculator.  If you only want to know the nutritional info on a one-time basis, you just enter the ingredients at Step 1, then go to Step 2 and enter the number of servings and click Calculate Info.  If you want to keep the recipe on file, you'll need to also go to Step 3 and complete the required fields (Recipe Name, Ingredients List and Category).  You may also want to input the Cooking Instructions so it's all there for you later.

I've found this to be really useful and have actually used it to find out the calories for some recipes from Allrecipes that didn't have that information.  I've also used it to tweak ingredients from some recipes to see if I can significantly cut calories and fat by using lighter versions of milk, cheese, sour cream, etc., or by adding vegetables or other lower calorie foods and upping the number of servings.