TheRecipeManager incorporates an extremely powerful user defined nutritional calculation feature. Using the USDA Nutritional database, you can select the exact ingredient that you are using in your recipe and calculate nutritional details for your recipes.

You can assign nutritional information to ingredients when you are adding or editing a recipe. To do this go to the Nutrition tab on the Recipe Browser. There you will see an 'Assign' button, the little food pyramid.

Press the 'Assign' button and you will be presented with a window that allows you to assign nutritional information from the USDA nutritional database to your recipe ingredients. The first ingredient for the recipe will be highlighted at the top of the window and a search will have been initiated to find ingredients that most closely match. You can refine this by selecting an item from the drop list that has been generated from words in the ingredient description.

If you see a question mark instead of a number of servings, the calculations will assume 1 serving, so if that's not right, you should go back and provide a number of servings, before assigning per-serving nutrition here.

Once you have found the ingredient in the nutritional database that matches the ingredient in your recipe you need to check that you have the correct serving size. If the ingredient amount can be converted to grams then the serving size will be automatically calculated and you can simply assign the nutritional values to the ingredient.

Conversion to grams is needed here because all the USDA data is based on 100-gram units.

If there is no direct conversion of the serving size, then you will need to specify this. Then you can either select the relevant serving size from the list at the bottom right of the window, or if there is no comparable serving size, you will need to enter this in grams in the field that appears below the ingredient list. You can also use the Override button to alter the gram size of the measure if it is incorrect.

Once you have done this select the 'Assign to ingredient' button, and the nutritional values will be assigned to your recipe ingredient. You can then continue and assign all the other ingredients in your recipe. Once you have assigned them all, select the √ 'Finished' button. This will close the nutritional assignment window and return you to the Nutrition tab of the recipe browser, with the nutritional information completed. Then select the √ 'Save' button to save the nutritional information with the recipe.

You can find a more detailed description of this feature in TheRecipeManager User Guide.