Portion control

There are things which took me by surprise about my emptying nest. Things which changed which I would never have even considered before.

One of them is that I struggle with portion control at mealtimes.

We are a family of five adults. Four of us have big appetites and one has a tiny appetite. (Although after careful research – ie seeing what her best friend’s parents eat, she believes she has a normal appetite.)

To complicate matters further, we have three meat eaters, one vegetarian and one vegan.

I’m the vegetarian, so I generally eat vegan to make life easier. But I absolutely won’t eat vegan cheese, nor will I give up cheese. Yes, the meat eaters could also eat vegan, and occasionally do, but I don’t feel that is fair on them.

When my younger son went to university in 2022, I initially struggled with portion sizes. In a family of big eaters, he is the biggest eater. But all I really had to do was buyer smaller packs of chicken. In a 640g pack of chicken, I would say he ate half and the other half was shared between my husband and daughter at an approximately two-thirds/ one-third split.

After that, the portions were OK for a while.

But in the past few months, my eldest has been eating with us less and less. He goes round to his girlfriend’s house and eats with her, he goes on holidays, he goes away with work…

And now the portion control is all over the place.

Most of the meals we eat are with either pasta or rice. I love both pasta and rice, so tend to make rather large quantities. And from one meal to the next, I can’t remember exactly how much I need to make. So the quantities I make can best be described as a mountain.

Is it one and half mugs of rice, just over or just under for three of us? I can’t remember. My fundamental error seems to be allocating as much to my daughter as I would to my eldest.

With pasta shapes, I can measure them out in a bowl. But with long spaghetti, I’m never really sure. I tend to think just under a packet for three of us. It gets more confusing when I finish one packet and start the next, because I don’t see the full quantity in the packet.

Over the last few months, the mountains of food have been gradually getting bigger. My husband has started to complain that I’m making too much. Although I’m very happy with the mountains and have no problem with eating it all.

Of course, I could weigh it. But I think we’ve all concluded that we tend to eat about twice as much as the recommended portion on the packet. So following the recommended portions will mean I make too little. (Strangely though, I weigh frozen chips and actually make us all the recommended portion. And if we’re eating some sort of frozen food like veggie burgers or fish, we just have one each – as recommended on the packet.)

The answer is probably that I should weigh out portions of perhaps 1.5 times the size recommended on the packet and see how we get on.

In the next few months, it will get more challenging. My eldest is just about to move out, then in September, all being well, my daughter will be going to university. Then I will have the issue of one packet of chicken being too much for one person. And my portion adjustments will need to start all over again…