As Thanksgiving approaches, having help preparing for the big day can ease your stress and make everything generally less hectic. If you’re hosting this Thanksgiving, you’ll be thankful to have these apps to help make your holiday easy and fun.
The Plan
While things are getting a bit too close for comfort, there’s still time to plan! From tableware to ingredients, having a single place to keep track of your Thanksgiving itinerary can be a lifesaver. Thanksgiving Planner for Android and iOS comes preloaded with over 160 items and allows you to keep track of all aspects of your Thanksgiving party. You can even set a timeline for when each step should be completed.
The Prep
Once you create a plan, it’s time to put it into action! Of course, making a detailed list for your Thanksgiving ingredients is an extremely important first step, but what if you’re having a hard time deciding what to serve? Allrecipes’ Dinner Spinner gives you access to over 50,000 recipes to help you discover new dishes. Additionally, it allows you to keep track of what food items you have at home via a virtual pantry. You even have the ability to scan items at the grocery store to discover recipes you can make with that item. Epicurious also offers a similar app that can interact with your Samsung refrigerator, allowing you to display your recipes directly on your smart refrigerator’s display.
If you know what to serve but have a hard time keeping track of all of your recipes, Paprika may be right for you. Paprika lets you organize your recipes, plan your meals, and create grocery lists with ease. You also have the ability to manually input recipes to give your handwritten family recipes a modern touch, or save recipes from anywhere on the web, allowing you to combine recipes from multiple sources into one easily-accessible database.
Once you’ve chosen your menu, you may want to consider the best wine pairings for your meal. Most of us aren’t sommeliers though, so why use an app targeted towards wine snobs? Hello Vino is a simple app that gives you a recommendation for the prefect bottle of wine every time. From popular picks and seasonal wines in your area, to choices by taste preference or food, Hello Vino gives you the power to pick the best wine without any of the guesswork.
If you still need help choosing the right wine for your meal based on your available options, Vivino is a great app that shows you reviews, rankings, and pricing just by taking a picture of the label. Additionally, if one of your guests brings a bottle of wine you’re unfamiliar with, you can quickly look it up and determine whether you should open and serve it immediately or enjoy it at another time.
The Unexpected
In the whirlwind of Thanksgiving prep, you may forget a thing or two. There’s also the risk of someone in your household using up an ingredient you bought specifically for Thanksgiving without knowing until its too late! If you find yourself in this situation, don’t fret- Instacart has got you covered. Instacart lets you order groceries from participating stores in your area and have them delivered to your door within an hour. While you should always be prepared (and check the hours of your participating grocery stores on Thanksgiving), you can cook with ease this Thanksgiving knowing that you won’t need to leave your turkey unattended to run out for any last-minute ingredients.
If there are no participating stores in your area or if you simply have no resources available to you on Thanksgiving, you may want to consider using the Substitutions app. Substitutions lets you find a replacement for any ingredient you may be missing from your pantry. It also allows you to sub out ingredients based on any food allergies or dietary restrictions you or your guests may have.
Cooking Apps
This year, Thanksgiving apps aren’t just for planning. There are many apps that can help make things easier in the kitchen on Thanksgiving day.
We all know that Thanksgiving is a marathon, and you’ll need a way to time multiple dishes simultaneously. While most smartphones come with a built-in timer or stopwatch app, chances are it doesn’t allow you to run many timers at the same time. Timer+ is a great free app that lets you run multiple timers at once. Still, in the chaos that is Thanksgiving, you may forget which timer is which. Specialized apps such as Thyme take it one step further by giving you the ability to display a separate timer for each burner on your stove as well as your oven. This way, you won’t run the risk of forgetting if the stuffing needs another 20 minutes or 2 hours.
As a fun alternative, Spotify also offers a Turkey Timer that lets you cook your turkey to perfection while enjoying a handful of great, premade playlists- just select the size of your turkey and the genre of your choice!
If your phone is your best friend in the kitchen, there are also a handful of smartphone meat thermometers available for purchase. Range is a cooking thermometer that plugs into your iPhone and iPad that lets you to take accurate temperature measurements of your turkey. Pre-loaded with USDA approved cooking times for meat and candy, Range can help you cook this year’s bird (or roast, or whatever!) to perfection.
Similar to Range, iGrill is a digital food thermometer that can interact with your phone through their proprietary app. While Range is a good hands-on solution, iGrill takes it one step further by allowing you to measure your food’s temperature via single or multiple probes and receive updates on your connected devices. Additionally, if used on a grill and not in an oven, iGrill probes can remain in your food while it’s cooking, allowing you to remotely check on your food without needing to run back out to the grill.
