From cooking Thanksgiving dinner for your family to baking gingerbread cookies for friends, you’re likely to put some serious time in the kitchen this holiday season. Lucky for you, your No. 1 kitchen helper might be in your pocket or on the counter: your smartphone or tablet.
Here are three ways your mobile device can help make your holiday cooking experience easy and fun.
Recipes
Some of the best recipes out there aren’t just in your cookbooks or scrawled on notecards – they’re on the internet. There are a number of great recipe apps, including Pepperplate, which imports recipes from popular websites and lets you scale them so you’re making just the right amount. It also lets you add your own recipes, so you’ll be sure to always have Grandma’s favorite apple pie instructions on hand.
Recipe apps aren’t just limited to food, though. Apps like Cocktail Flow will help you keep your guests entertained with hundreds of drink combinations. Just select which spirits and mixers drink bases you have on hand, and let the app do the work!
Conversions
Sometimes you can’t find the tablespoon you’re looking for, but you have a half-teaspoon. If you ever need conversions in a pinch, use Kitchen Dial to make measurement conversions easily and quickly with just a few swipes. The upgraded version also supports conversions for ingredient weights and Celsius to Fahrenheit. There is also a similar app called Cooking Conversions for Android that converts units of measure by volume and by weight.
Timing
Stuck with just the timers on your oven and microwave, but you have five things to keep track of? Use your device or an app like Easy Cooking Timer to make your life easier. It lets you time the items in your meal so that they all finish together. Kitchen Timer for Android also has various timers, allowing you to set multiple cook times for anything you’re cooking.
Check out the wide selection of small kitchen appliances to help you simplify cooking and snazz up your countertops on BestBuy.com or stop into your local store.