It’s great to cook from scratch – fun, healthy, and the meals you produce are likely to be much more nutrient-packed than ready meals or takeaways. Unless you’ve got a recipe book with calorie counts, though, you may have no idea how many calories or grams of fat are in your meal.

I’m a member of Weight Loss Resources, which has a great tool where you can enter your ingredients (from their vast database) and easily make a recipe. It is a paid-membership site, though, so I’ve created a free downloadable spreadsheet to let you calculate the calories in your favourite recipes.

It works for up to ten ingredients. You need to know the nutritional information for 100g of each ingredient – just look on the packet, or find the ingredient in a database such as Calorie Database (make sure you get the results for 100g).

Download the Calorie Counting SpreadsheetFill in the ingredients, and the number of portions the recipe makes, and the spreadsheet give you the calorie, fat, carb, protein and fibre count per portion. I’ve put in a couple of examples (potatoes and mince) to demonstrate how it works, so just delete those and replace with your own ingredients. Easy!

(You might also want to find out your recommended daily calorie intake.)