Capturing the Cooking Experience

Once again, I resolved that this year would be one of cooking more at home. I like being creative in the kitchen, using fresh ingredients, and knowing exactly what's in my food. There's also a ton of conventional wisdom saying that cooking at home can be healthier — but sometimes I'm not sure if that's really true. After all, my sandwich doesn't come with a nutritional label. There are plenty of tools that let people track the nutrition values of specific foods, from a cup of cereal to a frozen dinner entree. But it's tougher to find something that does what I want to do: enter all of the ingredients in my recipe, say how many servings it made, and find out what exactly I just ate. Then a friend told me about MyPlate, an offering from Livestrong.com that lets you build your own recipes and spits out a customized label with all the standard nutrition facts. Cool! ... if it worked, anyway. So I made an account, headed to the My Recipes tab, and started typing in this week's dinners. MyPlate did work, more or less — and better than I expected, anyway. I now have a little database of some of the meals I made this week, complete with estimates of their nutrition facts. But it felt a little weird to adapt my flexible (or, more accurately, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants) cooking process to the specificity of the information MyPlate needed. Adding foods to a recipe is a bit annoying, but nothing I haven't seen on similar tools before. In recording a stir-fry recipe, I had this list to choose from when adding broccoli: Chopped broccoli vs. "stalk broccoli," cups vs. grams — yikes. I'd just cut up whatever amount of broccoli had been sitting in my crisper, so I chose the most generic broccoli I could find in the list, took a guess on quantity, and moved on. The funniest part came when I got to the last field: Servings? Hmm, I cooked the stir-fry on Sunday and ate the leftovers for a few days. Counting up all the meals, I guessed it had made 7 servings. So far, so good. Yield, though? I have no idea! It made...a stir-fry? A big stir-fry? A lot of stir-fry? Absent any actual measurements, what was I supposed to type? I went with, "a lot of stir-fry." This field, it turns out, is what the nutrition label uses to tell you how big a serving is — "12 crackers," or "1/4 box," or what have you. So here's the label I got back for this meal: Serving size: "1/7 a lot of stir-fry." Heh. The experience of cooking can be a tricky one to capture. There's a bit of push and pull here, I think — between wanting to get exact measurements and quantities and wanting to intuitively make food that tastes the way you want it to taste. I'm far from an expert cook, but I'm trying to get better at making up my own recipes — and sometimes that means I end up with a dash of this, a pinch of that, and absolutely no idea how much soy sauce I poured into the wok. MyPlate is more flexible for cooks like me than anything I've come across before, as long as I'm OK with some guesstimating and some funny results (another one of my recipes has as its serving size "1/8 giant pot of tomato sauce"). But I do wonder: Are there some experiences even more free-form than cooking a dinner from scratch that are just immune to quantification?