Happy MacsGiving

If you're looking forward to a relaxing Thanksgiving holiday with friends and family don't forget about your Mac! Many people will leave their machines idle while enjoying turkey, football and stories with the family. Phooey. Here are some suggestions about things that you can do with your Mac over the Thanksgiving holiday.

First: Cook! There are a ton of excellent applications for managing recipes that will help you create the perfect feast:

CookWare Deluxe ($25) by Digital.Fried.Chicken can turn a Web page into a recipe in three clicks. It can even format recipes for your iPod.

Cuisine ($15) by The Triage Group has a simple, uncluttered Address Book-like interface and allows easy importing from any other recipe programs that support the RecipeML format.

Connoisseur ($20) by The Little App Factory manage your recipes in an iTunes-like interface and even auto-completes ingredients.

MacGourmet ($25) by Advenio, LLC allows you to create, edit and organize recipes. You can even post them to a dot-Mac account.

If you're not into spending money to manage your recipes online recipe sites like Epicurious and AllRecipes have a huge amount of holiday recipes in their databases. The best part about the online sites is that you can adjust quantities, print shopping lists and store your favorites in a virtual recipe box for free. I prefer AllRecipes because I like the user interface better and have stored more recipes there over the years.

To make your Mac look a little more festive download the Thanksgiving icons from the Icon Factory (pictured) and don't forget to grab some Thanksgiving wallpaper while you're at it. And if you absolutely must shop during the Black Friday mayhem, the Apple retail stores are again planning an after Thanksgiving sale at all their outlets.