Apps to help you plan your Thanksgiving

Your shopping list needs to be simple and easy to read if you don't want to forget the cranberry sauce. Grocery Gadget Shopping List is one of the best ways to stay organized for the grocery store. You can easily save pictures of what you need to get, scan barcodes, and even input if you have a coupon for said product! As if that wasn't amazing already, family and friends can sync their lists with you so that you can make sure everyone is taken care of this Thanksgiving.

Going to the grocery store? That's so last year! Peapod is your online shopping destination for all of your groceries. Peapod's app lets you walk the aisles of your supermarket without the need of putting any pants on. If you key in your Stop & Shop card number, all specials and past purchases appear. This makes your shopping easier since it's the items and brands you normally buy. All store sales carry over and they accept your coupons. Really short on time? Let Peapod guess your order and your cart fills in seconds with what you most likely need. Set a delivery time, check out, and you’re done.

Butterball has become synonymous with Thanksgiving. Each year they run a turkey hotline and have really worked to be front and center at this time of the year. Butterball's app is no different. This app comes loaded with tons of recipes for every aspect of your meal. Beautiful photos show off the finished product. Servings, prep method, difficulty and an area for notes appear when you tap a recipe. Tap the Prepare button and Butterball will walk you through each step in an enlarged view. This makes it perfect to have your iPad on the counter while cooking. Butterball also has a recipe box, meal planner, and shopping list feature. Navigation and responsiveness could be better, but the app does well. However, I could not get the voice command feature to work so be prepared to touch your screen as you go.

When you have people with dietary restrictions are coming over for Thanksgiving, it can be difficult to cook for everyone. Thanks to the folks at iCookbook, you can use this app for gluten-free recipes. Each meal shows you a full rundown of the ingredients and it'll be quite simple to make a gluten-free meal. The app looks to follow the exact same design as the Butterball app above. The layout is exactly the same along with all its features. You can prepare through an enlarged view, add items to a shopping list, and make great gluten-free food.

Most dinners on Thanksgiving have the old standbys. Switch it up a little with Thanksgiving Menu Maker, which lets you plan out your dinner with just a few taps. This app contains 75 recipes and it has a great price: free! All recipes are broken down into categories and you simply add the dishes you wish to make. A shopping list is then automatically created. The killer feature is the planner section. This area breaks prep down to the day before, Thanksgiving morning, four hours prior, etc. Finally, you can learn techniques from how-to videos within the app. If you use this app, you'll have a four course meal planned in minutes.

When you've got ten things cooking simultaneously, the timer on your microwave isn't going to cut it. KitchenPad Timer is a must-own application that does one thing and does it perfectly: runs multiple timers. You're shown five stove burners and four ovens, each ready to start counting down. You can label each one, give it its own alarm sound, and even designate the temperature you're using! With this app, you'll never burn the turkey again!

Sometimes you'd love to have a trained chef in your kitchen to help with Thanksgiving dinner. Enter Snapguide, a visual walkthrough app for preparing your Thanksgiving meal. Snapguide features a number of how-to guides showing you how to get your turkey cooked perfectly, sauté some veggies and make a rockin' dessert. The magic of Snapguide is that it's a full visual presentation of your task and it guides you through with ease. This is the next best thing to having Bobby Flay in your kitchen giving you lessons.

Another underrated place to find Thanksgiving ideas is none other than Pinterest. With Pinterest's mobile app, getting that light bulb in your noggin to light up has never been easier. Simply plug in what you're looking for in the search bar and let Pinterest do the rest. Of course, if you aren't exactly sure what it is that you are looking for, you can browse through pins by categories, which is never a let down.

The TV destination for all things cooking has doubled-down on Thanksgiving. Their app has taken its wealth of recipes and collected them into a Thanksgiving section. Once launched, the section breaks food down by type and even throws in some Alton Brown to make things easier. Each recipe shows full reviews, a note section to add your comments, and the ability to save it to your recipe box. That feature easily creates a shopping list for that trip to the store. Video tutorials, a unit converter, and a built-in timer round out this app making it a must-download for turkey day.

While you're waiting for the turkey to defrost, the best thing to do is grab a cup of coffee and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It's been a tradition for over 85 years and kids love watching the huge balloons float down the streets of Manhattan. Macy's has released a new app for 2014 to interact with the parade through a lot of fun activities. Tap and scroll through many video clips of the classic balloons. Children can create their own parade balloons of themselves using your iPhone's camera. Macy's has provided behind the scenes access along with an easy way to keep up with the parade on Twitter.

If it's Thanksgiving, that means the Lions are taking the field for their annual game. NFL Mobile tracks the stats of each down while you're digesting some of that stuffing. Real-time stats appear as the game progresses with diagrams showing the current plays. You can also track how your fantasy team is performing on turkey day. Each team's roster is broken down, letting you see the stats for every move they've made during the game. If you're a Verizon subscriber, you can get special features such as extra live streaming of games and the NFL Network. This app also features limited live video and audio of selected games, so you are never too far from the action.

Once we've indulged in turkey and a numerous amount of desserts, it'll be time to plan your Black Friday shenanigans (if you're into that sort of thing). Black Friday 2014 Ads App by BlackFriday.fm makes it easy to figure out which store to hit first on your shopping adventure. The app is jam-packed with a ton of stores and sorts all of their deals by the respective category that each item belongs to. This is definitely a must have for any holiday shopper this Friday.