The FastDay Forum

obviously its a yes but say look at this recipe from the lovely Jamie,.. a recipe i saw on late night cable telly the other day.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chic ... s-tzatziki

it says 683 per serve.. the recipe allows for 4 serves. so if i just 1/2ed the serve.eg. make half of it if its just the 2 of us. then i shouldnt "dismiss" this recipe. im eating less but as long as i add a few low cal additions like a green salad, tomatoes, etc, then i can be well within my 500 calorie limit per day.

is that a good way to approach 5:2, and evaluating recipes for fast day meals

Looks tasty. Alternatively if you just shaved a bit off the couscous, feta and ditched the oil, but kept all the veggies you might get it well into your fast day allowance that way too!

I have a concern when I divide a recipe into 2. I do it spoon by spoon but obviously what ends up on each plate is not identical. I worry that I am eating more than half the calories.
As regards your recipe I would probably reconstruct it and work out the calories. I think I might substituting cauliflower rice for some or all of the couscous and I would drastically reduce the oil.

I'm probably wrong but I thought the figures at the end, per serving, are what each person eats, so multiply by 4 for the total calories of the recipe.

Under the cals there are daily %ages for the average woman and 683 would equal the 34% shown (using 2000 cals for Mrs Average). By halving the 683 cals per portion, a portion becomes a 1/4 serving of the full recipe at 341.5 per person. Just looking at dry weight couscous and cals for 50g = 185ish and recipe calls for 300g.

Or has the temperature I'm running scrambled my brain - wouldn't be surprised!

If I'm understanding you correctly, I'm afraid that won't work Juliana.Rivers; AnnieW is right, Jamie's calorie count is for one quarter of his recipe.
I checked it in the website caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php, and the overall calorie total was about 4 times the calories for a serving...
I don't cook from recipes on fast days, but alot of people seem to rate the Hairy Dieters recipes, so maybe they would be worth looking at?

I agree with the others, the calorie count x4 is the total cals for the recipe, to halv the calories you would need to serve 8 instead of 4. I have cooked things like this on fast days before, I would start by changing the recipe slightly by cutting down on couscous, oil and yoghurt then recoubt, you could well cut the extra cals with just a few changes!