@oristarA,
Well Oristar, if I were making a salad with lettuce and using a recipe - which is not something I would usually do - but say I was - in my experience, the recipe would say:
'Use the leaves from one head of lettuce' or 'two heads of lettuce' or 1/2 a head of lettuce' or 'fill up a salad bowl with lettuce leaves' -unless the lettuce was supposed to be shredded and then it might say, 'use two cups shredded lettuce', and then I would put shredded lettuce in a cup until it reached the top twice.
Or say I was making cole slaw - then it would tell me to use 'six cups finely shredded cabbage' or something like that, so then I would shred enough cabbage to fill up six one cup measuring cups.
That's how I would use my measuring cups to measure that green veg.
Here's an example:
1 head lettuce cut up
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped green pepper
1 onion, diced
1 pkg. green frozen peas, uncooked
1 cup mayo
Again, I think it's a cultural thing. I grew up cooking in America and I've been cooking since I was a young child - so I'm used to using measuring cups.
Where I'm from the recipes that call for vegetables usually say things like, 'Peel and dice eight potatoes' or 'six tomatoes' or thoroughly rinse three cups of broccoli florets'- they very rarely say, 'peel and dice five pounds of potatoes' and I've never, ever seen a recipe that asked me to weigh lettuce leaves for a salad.
I'm not saying you haven't, but I haven't.
And it is true that for the purposes of the five servings of vegetable they're talking about in your example, the amounts would or could be considerably different.
For instance, you would need to eat cups and cups of lettuce to get the same amount of nutrients you could get in a much smaller amount of broccoli as broccoli is denser in nutrients than lettuce - which is mostly water.
