What's the difference between a recipe and a meal?

Recipes represent single dishes that can be split up into multiple servings – consider something like "Mom's Famous Veggie Casserole". Conversely, a meal is a collection of individual food items eaten together, such as your typical "Weekday Breakfast".

When you log a recipe, only one item shows up in your food log. When you log a meal, every item in that meal is logged separately.

Recipes

Recipes are extremely helpful for situation when you are preparing a dish that can be split up into multiple or partial servings.

For instance, let's consider Mom's casserole dish that makes six servings. The prepared dish is a single item, yet it's composed of multiple ingredients like breadcrumbs, butter, onion, mushrooms, corn, and cheese. All of these individual elements are accounted for and measured separately to form the complete casserole.

In Foodnoms, you'd want to create a recipe for this dish before logging it. This has a few benefits:

1. You will see a single entry, "Mom's Famous Veggie Casserole", in your food log. Not every single ingredient, which would get very noisy.
2. When creating the recipe, you can input that it make 6 servings. Then when you log the recipe, you can say how many servings you ate (maybe you just had a half-serving, or you had seconds!).
3. You can also enter in the total weight of the recipe, which allows you to similarly log how much you ate in grams or ounces.
4. Since the recipe is saved in your Food Library, you can easily log it again later. You can also duplicate the recipe (see "Can you duplicate recipes and meals?"), if you want to make variations.

To log a recipe, follow these steps:

1. Go to the "Log Food" screen.
2. Navigate to "Library" > "Recipes".
3. Select the recipe you want to log.
4. Select the portion size and enter in the number of portions.
5. Tap "Log" to add it to your Food Log.

Meals

Meals are beneficial for quickly logging multiple, individual food items that are consumed together but aren't necessarily a single dish. Take your regular breakfast as an example. It may consist of coffee and toast. If you save these two items together as a meal and call it "Weekday Breakfast", you'll be able to simply log this meal instead of having to log coffee and toast separately every time.

There are two ways to create a meal:

1. After logging a meal, tap the "…" button in the food log, then select "Save Meal".
2. From the "Log Food" screen, tap the "+" button in the bottom toolbar, then select "Create Meal".

To log a saved meal, here's the process:

1. Go to the "Log Food" screen.
2. Navigate to "Library" > "Meals".
3. Select the meal you wish to log.
4. Tap "Log" to add all of the meals' items to your Food Log.