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 when you're preparing a dish that can be split 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'll 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 makes 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 the total weight of the recipe, which allows you to log how much you ate in grams or ounces.

4. Since the recipe is saved in your Library, you can easily log it again later. You can also duplicate it (see "Can you duplicate recipes and meals?") if you want to make variations.

To log a recipe:

1. Go to the Library tab and select Recipes (you can also find your recipes by searching when logging food).

2. Select the recipe you want to log.

3. Choose the portion size and enter the number of portions.

4. Tap Log to add it to your Food Log.

Meals

Meals are great for quickly logging multiple, individual food items that are consumed together but aren't a single dish. Take your regular breakfast: it may consist of coffee and toast. If you save these two items together as a meal called "Weekday Breakfast", you can log the whole meal in one step instead of logging coffee and toast separately every time.

There are two ways to create a meal:

1. After logging the items in your Food Log, open the meal's menu, choose Save, then Save as Meal.

2. From the Library tab, select Meals, then tap the + button.

To log a saved meal:

1. Go to the Library tab and select Meals.

2. Select the meal you wish to log.

3. Tap Log to add all of the meal's items to your Food Log.