Day 142 -- Now This Is Cool

I've been concerned about my protein intake lately.  I haven't been doing as much cooking as I was a few months back and at the end of the day, haven't had as many legumes and whole grains as I should have.  Time to start paying closer attention.

I was interested in figuring out the protein content of one of my favorite recipes and had heard about online calculators.  So I went out on a search and came back with this!  It's from the Calorie Count website.

I entered my recipe for Wheatberry and Wild Rice Salad and came up with all kinds of useful information (see above).  First, you have to enter the number of servings in the recipe, then type in the recipe.  You may have to look up a few of the ingredients on their database if the application doesn't recognize an ingredient.  But once that's done, it gives the calorie counts of all the ingredients (per serving).  It also gives a nutrition grade for each of the incredients.  My salad got straight As except for the B+ for the wild rice.

In addition, it gives a traditional nutrition label that lists protein, fat, carbos, sodium and cholesterol.  And finally, it gives you the good and the bad points about the recipe.  The only thing it doesn't do is give Omega 3 and 6 counts, which would be really great info for vegans and vegetarians.

It does have a few glitches.  I entered a 15 oz. CAN of garbanzos and it read it as 15 oz. of garbanzos, which isn't right.  So I had to go back and look for a can in the data base and figure out how many cups of garbanzos there were in a can.  And I needed to figure out if the app was reading the whole grains as cooked or uncooked.

Over the next week I'm going to try to keep better track of my protein intake and she where I'm at.  The subject of protein requirements is a whole can of worms that I'll open in my next post.  How much protein do I need every day? (And, as a good vegan, I'll let the can of worms go in my garden after opening, if anyone is asking.)