Eat This Not That Part I

I used the recipe calculator from Spark People and it says that my stuffed shells recipe had roughly 1900 calories and 70 g of fat. Assuming that I eat 1/6 of the whole, that is about 315 calories (which is fine) and 12 grams of fat, 6 of those 12 being saturated fat (which is not so fine!).

This is a cause for concern for me, so I thought I would go through and see what is so bad about this recipe. Well, first of all, the biggest calorie contributor is actually the pasta shells. The 12 oz box of shells had 480 calories, but I know that I had at least 10 shells left over, so let's cut that down to 2/3 of that - 320 calories.

Next in line is the parmesan cheese - 332 calories, but no surprises there. I already cut back by not adding a whole cup of cheese to the top.

The crushed tomatoes weighed in at 256 calories, I guess just from shear volume of tomatoes? Not sure how I can help that.

1 1/2 cups of cottage cheese has 244 calories. I only had a cup of cottage cheese, but then again, I didn't have enough filling to make all the shells, so not sure this is a good way to cut back. Plus, its delicious :)
At 239 calories, the olive oil is the last major contributor to calories. Makes me wonder if I could have just used Pam. If you also are wondering about the healthiness of olive oil - read this.

Let's see our total savings:

Pasta - 160 calories (1/3 not used)

Cottage Cheese - 80 calories (1/2 cup removed)

Olive oil - 230 calories (replaced with pam)

470 calories saved

That brings us down to 1430 calories for the whole dish. It would probably bring down some of the fat too without the olive oil and cottage cheese. But I never know how accurate these recipe calculators are anyways because they ask for some foods in grams and some in ounces and some in cups, and that is not always how I originally measured them.