App of the Week: How To Prepare Your T-Day Feast

With Thanksgiving upon us, please tell me you've got your meal all planned out – unless you intend on serving a Charlie Brown feast. Buttered toast, popcorn, pretzels and jelly beans. Yum, yum!

Whipping up a T-day extravaganza for a group of people won't be a problem for the experienced home chef (assuming you got your turkey order in early), but for novices or for someone looking to serve something more, er, meaty than that round-headed kid and his dog, try the free Fine Cooking magazine Thanksgiving Menu Maker iPad app, a complement to the magazine's Cooking Holidays app.

Contained within the sleek magazine-like app are more than 75 recipes for starters, main dish, sides and, my favorite course, desert (although there are a dearth of chocolate and cherry choices – a hint for those preparing a Thanksgiving meal I may be attending and reading this).

Among the 16 main dishes, there are 11 turkey recipes, including a method painfully called "dry-rubbed." I'm glad the worst that could happen to the turkey has happened to it before you subject it to this cringe-inducing process. Dry rub. Burr!

More than recipes

But this is more than a mere recipe app, even though the designers didn't go all the way.

For instance, you choose a recipe from each course to create a menu. But you can't export the menu to, say, email it to attendees or to create a printed version include with the place settings, so I'm not sure what the point of this menu-creation exercise. I guess you can capture a screen image (press the Home button and the on/off button to snap a photo of your iPad screen) and email the JPEG to your invitees.

From your menu, the app creates a detailed shopping list, complete with quantities and weights necessary for the recipe. You can't print the list from the iPad for some reason, but you can email it to yourself to print it.

But, again, the app doesn't go all the way.

Each recipe indicates how many scarfers it'll serve – but what if you need to serve a different number? Why doesn't the app let you adjust the number of served to suit your situation and calculate the shopping quantities and recipe accordingly? After all, this app IS on an iPad – a computer.

Menu Maker also creates a detailed do-to list schedule to perfectly time all elements of your preparation – from what to do the night before and almost every moment leading up to actual consumption. And each step has a link back to the recipe references, which is a thoughtful touch.

Finally, there are Turkey Day Tips – links to helpful hints such from "What to Drink" to "Leftovers You'll Love" found on the Fine Cooking Web site.

Even with its lack of re-calculating quantities, T-day cooks will find Thanksgiving Menu Maker a handy helper. You're on your own for the centerpiece, though.