Can you help me determine a ballpark calorie figure for grandma's stew?

September 15, 2006 11:56 AM

Can you help me determine a ballpark calorie figure for grandma's stew?

So my grandmother makes this stew/concoction everyday and whoever passes through her house [a family hub central] usually grabs a bowl. The school year means I'm passing through every weekday, and before I chow down I'd really like to know what sort of calories/nutritional values I'm dealing with.

Receipe:
-500g steak mince/ground beef [the kind with hardly "white" in the meat]
- Carrots
- Parsnips
- Mushrooms
- Onion
- Packet o' oxtail soup.

According to my investigations, grandmother boils the mince, leaves it stand overnight and then skims off the layer of fat the next morning [I've never heard of that before, but whatever]. Then the raw, chopped veg are added, then the soup. It's brought to the boil again and then left simmer in a veritable cauldron [oh you think I'm joking] all day and people just take what they want from there.

So far, I've been grabbing a cereal bowl for dinner - any idea of the calorific value of that?

Everyone else grabs say a pasta bowl of the stew, and then they add in boiled potatoes, sprinkle cheddar on top and a few cuts of buttered bread - surely that must be calorie overload?

A part of me says the stew is fine and to stop being so anal - but I've worked really dilligently to lose a stone in weight this past month through exercise and good diet, so I dont want my dinner everyday to be a possible blind spot.

And we're Irish, in case you couldn't tell [not that it impacts anything, but yeah. Suspecions confirmed.]

posted by Chorus to food & drink (8 comments total)

How many cups (or ounces or grams or kilograms) do you think you eat in a cereal bowl? I think bowl sizes vary widely. What I call a cereal bowl my mother calls a fruit bowl. What I call a pasta bowl my mom calls a vegetable bowl...etc.
posted by Not in my backyard at 12:00 PM on September 15, 2006

Something I tend to do when i really want to know the caloric value of a recipe is to input all the ingredients into fitday.com. I just add them all to my current day of food until i get a calorie total for just those ingredients, then divide it by the number of servings the recipe makes. Due to the fact that your grandmother skims the fat from the meat, i would input the leanest beef option. That's if you really HAVE to know.

But seriously, if you're eating reasonably throughout the day, and you're not eating a whole cauldron's worth of stew, I wouldn't be worried about eating this. It's good you're passing up the cheddar and bread. Those will add a hefty bunch of calories to your meal. But beef, real vegetables, and stew mix are all generally healthy things to eat. They're real food -- not mac'n'cheese. I wouldn't eat beef every night of my life (saturated fat, etc) but don't lose sleep over having a good dinner.
posted by theantikitty at 12:19 PM on September 15, 2006

Calorie-count.com (now a part of About.com) has a recipe analyzer that might help.
posted by arco at 12:19 PM on September 15, 2006

http://www.calorie-count.com/calories/item/23502.html
according to this 100 grams of beef is 250 calories. All the other stuff is pretty low cal, so I would count as neglible. So a fifth of the recipe would come in at around 300 calories.
posted by stormygrey at 12:21 PM on September 15, 2006

I second the fitday.com suggestion. I use it for this kind of thing as well.
posted by thejanna at 12:29 PM on September 15, 2006

I don't have an exact number, but I can tell you it's a mixed bag. Look beyond pure calories.

- The Good: Lean meat = good protein source. Fresh(?) ingredients. Not processed. Better for you than bread. You're skipping the potatoes.

- The Bad: Oxtail soup, possibly, depending on its fat content; the real stuff is very fatty. Boiling vegetables for that long drains them of most of their nutritional value. Parsnips and carrots have a lot of carbs in them. No roughage.

Try skipping the parsnips next time. And maybe make it a point to eat some raw/steamed veggies every day. Do you eat greens? Seriously, you need that stuff to clean out your system.
posted by mkultra at 12:33 PM on September 15, 2006

There's a US government site that gives the nutritional info, including calories, for every imaginable food, but I can't recall where to find it at the moment.
posted by winston at 12:38 PM on September 15, 2006

Here it is.
posted by bink at 3:10 PM on September 15, 2006