I'm doing a lot more serious cooking from basics at the moment (the joys of suddenly being made redundant!) and am unsure of how to calculate carb, calorie, fat etc values for dishes from raw ingredients.
For exmple, currently simmering on the stove is a vast seething cauldron of rendang, a malaysian beef and coconut stew. The main calorie-containing ingredients when raw are:
2 kilos of stewing steak
1.6 litres coconut milk
200 g red pepper
300 g onion
120 g resh ginger.

All other ingredients are dry spices - cloves, chillis, lime leaves, cinnamon stick, etc

My calorie counter gives a value for stewing steak, lean and fat, stewed ie already cooked. How do I reconcile this with values for raw ingredients? Basically, this cooks down into a semi-solid meat sludge - it simmers for 4 hours.
I notice that quite a lot of foods have a different carb count when cooked from raw, but there are lots of different ways of cooking. What if the book says "Boiled" for something (in this case, cabbage) and I microwaved it then baked it into a meatloaf.
I'd be happy with a url pointing me in the direction of more reading.
Zan