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dailyplate.com has a huge database, with brand names.

I second dailyplate.com; it's great.

i also like nutritiondata.com

I usually just add up all the calorie contents of the ingredients and divide by how many people I intend for it to serve (or how much I intend to eat, ha). I use labels for prepackaged ingredients and the web for everything else. You have to be careful not to assume what you have at home is the same as what you find online-- for example, not all chicken breasts or hamburgers are created equal. Better to find something that says "80% lean ground beef is X calories per ounce" then multiply the number of ounces you actually use by the calorie count per ounce, then divide by the number of servings. A kitchen scale is a must for home nutrition info calculations.

Calorie-count.com has a decent recipe calculator, although you have to check to be sure it got the right ingredient sometimes. It's the one I use.

This would almost take all of the fun out of cooking.

I agree with rosebud above. I would not want to count calories for ALL of my cooking, but maybe once in a while it would be a good exercise. If I knew the calorie count of a few common ingredients (a teaspoon of butter, a cup of flour, a medium onion, etc), then I could just do the math in my head. Thanks for the useful links, all.

- Amelia of Gradually Greener

I use sparkpeople when I decide to care - it's really easy to use, and saves things that you have made before if you want to look back at them.

nutritiondata.com and a bit of math.

I occasionally use sparkpeople. Its fairly fast and easy to use.

www.nutrimirror.com is a great free site to input your recipes and find out their nutritional value. It's been a great eye opener for me and I've been able to adjust some of my usual recipes to be healthier yet just as tasty! I agree with heatherk that having a food scale is really important when you want accurate calculations. Also watch out for food entries on the daily plate that have not been verified by their management. I have run across some items that are not consistant with the manufacturers information.

There is a new 'searchengine' which can calculate nutrition information for you.

Go to http://www.wolframalpha.com and use a query like '1 cup of milk 1 cup of flour 1 egg'.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1 cup of milk %2B 1 cup of flour %2B 1 egg

This will give you a nice label containing all the information you need.

Why would you want to do this? Just start walking to the grocery store and back instead of driving and try eating less.

I don't get the obsession with calorie counts. This sort of dissection of food doesn't actually provide any more meaningful information than looking at the food type and quantity and deciding whether or not it's a good choice or not.

The sites look helpful, but I've taken to just getting out a calculator and doing my own math. It's so much better to cook than to eat all of that pre-processed diet food.
Even if you like vegetable and yes, even walk to the grocery store, you might have a few pounds to lose. Apportioning home-cooked food also helps you re-train your idea of portion size, which can be a challenge when the food is good, and mine often is!

I use Sparkpeople very often to add up the ingredients of a recipe in order to see the nutrition per serving. It's a great site to help in weight loss and maintenance! I understand that calorie counting can take the fun out of cooking, but to me the knowledge is very powerful in keeping my weight maintained where I want it.

Not all nutritional info is calorie counting, y'all. ;)

Before I went on sparkpeople, I had no idea I was getting so little fiber and calcium in my diet. As Randi says above... Knowledge is power. :)

And even if you don't want to calorie count for every meal for every day, measuring just a few meals can give you a better idea of what you're eating. If you know a tablespoon of olive oil is 120 calories, and measure it for once, you can see that maybe you only need one tablespoon and 2 would be overkill.

This is my go to site: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/

It's a great resource for whole foods, and quite a few convenience foods are listed too. Unless you're into the metric system, I find it helpful to uncheck the "100 grams" option on the "select amount" page.