WW Recipe Builder

I have a love/hate relationship with the WW recipe builder.  

Sometimes it's great, and using it can totally work out better for me.  I love seeing that changing a dessert recipe to 20 servings instead of 18 will cut the points value down by 1.  I also love being able to be creative with substitutions and seeing how I can change the points around to be in my favor.

But I hate how sometimes things come out to be more points than the individual parts.  I know that it tracks the nutritional value of fruits and veggies, and adds that in.  I also know that WW rounds the points values, so sometimes a serving is really 1.3 points, which is why 2 servings gets rounded up to 3.  Both things make sense.  But when you are working with just 26 points a day, every point counts. 

I play with the system a little bit sometimes.  For instance, if a majority of the recipe is made up of zero points value foods, then I will only count the ones that are points.  Or if I'm adding something to bulk up a meal, such as throwing 2 cups of broccoli into a casserole, I won't count the broccoli.

One of the the things that I try to do to avoid this problem is to make what I can as single serve portions.  For a lot of things I end up making 3 servings, 1 for me, and 2 for Dan.  I don't want the points for my serving to go up because I'm making all 3.  So I'll make the recipe 3 separate times.  That way I can track my 1 serving, and only add the ingredients to the tracker, rather than building a recipe.

Because of this, many of my recipes are only 1 serving.  You can easily make multiple servings at once, I just find it easier for tracking purposes to track my portions on my own.   It doesn't actually take extra time in the kitchen.  While the oven is preheating, I'll make my one portion.  I'll throw that on one portion of the cookie sheet, and then in the same bowl I'll prep Dan's 2 servings together.  With the help of a skillfully folded piece of aluminum foil, our portions are kept separate, and then easily transferred to our plates.