Time your turkey right and convert measurements easily: cooking apps to help with a calm and organised Christmas day
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- Stylist Team
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Christmas dinner is, notoriously, the most stressful of meals to cook. From putting the turkey on several hours before you even think about sitting down to trying to balance a mountain of trays in your oven, while laying the table and greeting your guests, it can become overwhelming if you haven't made a plan beforehand.
But thankfully the dawn of the smartphone and tablet means that there are now hundreds of apps that can help with timings, recipes and even leftovers. And without having to flick through books that end up covered in gravy, many of these apps can be used hands free so that you can get 100 things done at once, and end up looking like superwoman.
Prepare for a calm, argument-free Christmas.
1. Substitutions
Free on iOS
This app offers a host of alternatives if you have a guest coming with an allergy to a particular ingredient - offering alternatives to milk and butter for lactose intolerant guests for instance - but is also very handy if you found you've run out of a key ingredient in a recipe.
2. Cookbookkey
£1.99 on iOS, soon to launch on Android
If your kitchen shelf is groaning with cookbooks and you can never find the exact recipe you want, this app is a lifesaver. Simply scan in the barcodes of your books and it gives you a searchable database of their recipes.
3. Butterball Cookbook Plus
4. Great British Chefs Kids
Free on iOS
If you have children around at Christmas, it can make it a lot easier to show them how the meal is being put together than worrying about what they are up to while you're cooking. This app has a host of child-friendly recipes from Michelin-starred chefs for fairly complex dishes and how you can cook them with a child.
5. Paprika
6. Kitchen Timer Pro
£1.99 on iOS
Having just one kitchen timer can be a nightmare when you have several dishes on the go - thankfully this multi-timer app lets you note down how long everything has left, all one one screen.
7. Love Food Hate Waste
8. Riverford Veg
Free on iOS
Struggling to do something inventive with swedes? No idea how to tackle a butternut squash? This app from the Riverford farm shop gives you hundreds of ideas for vegetable dishes to go alongside, or as the main event at a Christmas meal.
9. Epicurious
10. Escoffier Cooks Companion
Free on iOS
If you're cooking with a recipe that uses imperial measurements, converting to metric can be a nightmare, but this app makes it simple to convert pounds to grams and inches to centimetres.