Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate the things we’re thankful for and reconnect with family and friends over a good meal. Here are eight apps for Windows and Windows Phone to help make sure you have a safe, hassle-free and enjoyable holiday.
Bing Food & Drink
The Bing Food & Drink app is a must-have on your tablet or laptop for Thanksgiving. The new app makes it easy to explore recipes from all around the world, choose from more than 100,000 wines and cocktails, and learn tips from celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Tom Colicchio to make your next meal a taste-tempting success with family and friends. Not that you have to be a celebrity chef to cook a mean bird or get those garlic mashed potatoes just right.
Bing Food & Drink provides immaculate photos (as seen in the screenshot above), easy-to-follow instructions and tools such as a shopping list and meal planner to help you prepare your Thanksgiving dinner. You can also use the app to enter notes or upload your own favorite recipes, and then share them with a single tap of your finger – a great way to make the relatives happy when they ask for your sweet potato pie recipe!
One of the coolest features of the app is its “Hands Free Mode.” Here’s how it works: Let’s say you’re preparing Swedish meatballs and you’re ready to move on to the next step in the recipe, only your hands are all sticky from handling the ingredients. No worries in THIS kitchen. With the “Hands Free Mode,” you can navigate recipes with a simple wave of your hand. No more messy fingers on your device’s glossy, pristine gorilla glass!
On a related note, the Rachael Ray show will feature Colicchio on Dec. 3. During the show, he will show off some of his favorite cooking items, including the Bing Food & Drink app. Don't miss it!
Thanksgiving Recipes
Thanksgiving Recipes by ifood.tv has everything you need to prepare an awesome meal. As soon as I open the app on my Surface, I’m greeted by a menu of tiles that includes video recipe categories such as cakes, casseroles, drinks, gravy, pie, sauce, soup and stuffing. And, of course, there are countless turkey recipes – roast turkey, cider brined turkey, turkey with almonds and apricots and more.
You can also search by course, ingredients, method, taste and interest. Maybe you don’t want to do the traditional turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing meal. My wife is from New Orleans, which means I eat a lot of Southern food. We’re giving serious consideration to replacing one of our regular side dishes with a chicken and sausage gumbo recipe that we found in the Thanksgiving Recipes app.
If you’re like me and you have more success watching someone else prepare a recipe as opposed to following one from a book, then Thanksgiving Recipes and its massive library of thousands of videos might just be right up your alley. You can find it in the Windows Store.
Prefer to cook with your Windows Phone close by? I also recommend Yumvy and AllRecipes.
Cocktail Flow
Cocktail Flow is one of my favorite apps for when my wife and I entertain guests. I am not a connoisseur of cocktails by any stretch of the imagination, but this app for Windows and Windows Phone sure goes a long way in helping me make passable drinks for my friends and family.
The first thing you’ll notice about the app is its sleek, sparse and easy-to-navigate set-up. You don’t need to know a thing about making cocktails to get started. The app has three guides for entry-level cocktail creation that go into measurement units (what does it mean when a recipe calls for “one part Bourbon whiskey, one part Sambuca”?), glassware, barware and garnishes.
One of my favorite features in Cocktail Flow is the Cabinet. Here’s how it works: you swipe through a menu of spirits, mixers and liqueurs, selecting the ones you have in your actual bar cabinet and Cocktail Flow will generate drink ideas for you. For example: in your bar you’ve got some vodka, gin and bourbon whiskey, as well as some sugar syrup, grenadine, lemon juice and orange juice and some triple sec. Whammo! Cocktail Flow comes up with 11 different drinks you can make for your guests.
The app also breaks down drinks by spirit and by color. So, if someone asks for something with rum in it, all you have to do is tap on the rum category. If someone asks for something red or blue, all you have to do is tap the red or blue category. Easy peasy!
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