For the majority of Americans, Thanksgiving is all about the food. Of course, getting the chance to take a break from the stress of normal daily life is wonderful and the prospect of seeing family and friends from all around the country is great too, but when it all comes down to it, the huge feast is what makes the day Thanksgiving. While some Thanksgiving feasts are prepared by a single person, usually the only person in the family that is actually adept at cooking, others are prepared by a communal effort from the whole family, and yet others are held in a potluck style where all of the guests are responsible for bringing some sort of appropriate Thanksgiving dish. In all of these situations, it is essential that the cook utilize the best recipes: if you are cooking for your family and yourself, the food certainly has to taste good, and if you are preparing a dish for a potluck-style feast, it is always fun to receive compliments on your culinary talents. Here are a handful of websites to get you started on your quest for the perfect Thanksgiving dish recipe.

All Recipes has an extensive section of the website devoted to Thanksgiving recipes. The home page of the website features some of the most popular recipes, such as Cranberry Relish, and then offers articles that give useful tips and advice, such as how to carve the turkey, how big of a turkey to purchase, how to thaw the turkey, and how long to roast the turkey. In fact, even if you think you are an expert on Thanksgiving proceedings, All Recipes offers a set of Cooking Questions that deal with some very common concerns, at the same time providing several new ideas that you may not have considered. As far as the recipes on the website, they are categorized handily into several areas, such as Appetizers, Gravy, Potatoes, Pumpkin, and other popular foods that are prepared on Thanksgiving. Especially useful – and mouth-watering – is the pie section of the website, which provides a large compendium of pie recipes for every palate. The website has a new recipe for each day, as well as a tab that allows you to see the Top 20 most popular recipes in each category to help you decide based on the popularity of the recipes. Not only does All Recipes have recipes galore, but it also has plenty of tips and tricks to make your Thanksgiving special for you and yours.

If you are a food aficionado to begin with, you are undoubtedly familiar with Food Network, the television station devoted to food in all forms and fashions. Appropriately, the Food Network has created a website devoted to Thanksgiving recipes. Food Network’s Thanksgiving site operates like a search engine: type in whatever food you are looking to craft into a masterpiece into the search box and then browse the results at your leisure. This searches through the entirety of Food Network’s catalogue of recipes, so the results can be quite overwhelming. For example, a simple search of “celery” provide 114 results, so if you are looking to incorporate a heavy dose of celery into your Thanksgiving dinner, there are plenty of recipes available to you through Food Network’s website. Similarly, there are 1,769 results for “turkey” so needless to say, you may want to be specific in your search terms. To help you narrow down your recipe search, the Thanksgiving section of Food Network’s site offers three Thanksgiving menus to give you ideas, as well as the Top 100 most popular Thanksgiving-related recipes. All in all, if you want to browse through many alternatives to find just the perfect recipe, the Food Network Thanksgiving site is the one to use.

Although its name might suggest the opposite, Razzle Dazzle Recipes is surprisingly easy to navigate, with no flashy advertisements or obtrusive banners. Instead, the home page of the site is neatly organized to have the newest recipes displayed clearly, as well as nine different categories of recipes. Clicking a recipe takes you to a page where the recipe is spelled out in clear, easy-to-read font, refreshingly free of clutter. Navigating through the recipe categories is simple as well, since every recipe within each category is further organized to direct your attention to exactly what it is you are looking for. While there certainly are plenty of recipes on the site, navigating through them is not daunting and the recipes are high-quality and easy to follow. The site itself is warm and in the spirit of the holiday, with autumn colors and Thanksgiving imagery evoking the sense of the magnificent feast to come. If you want a no-nonsense place to find some great recipes, Razzle Dazzle Recipes delivers.

Food & Wine’s Ultimate Thanksgiving Guide rivals All Recipe’s website as the place to go if you want to know about absolutely everything related to putting on an excellent Thanksgiving feast for your friends and family. Bright, high-quality photos are everywhere on the website, detailing clearly the fruit of your labor should you indulge in any of the wonderful recipes, and neatly-arranged slideshows provide a great way to browse through the large selection of recipes while keeping in mind exactly what each recipe would ideally turn out to look like. Next to each picture in the slideshows is a tantalizing description of the dish, while a link beneath the description takes you directly to the recipe, allowing you to easily link the recipe to the product. From crème fraiche biscuits to pumpkin cheesecake, Food & Wine provides the right mix of the exotic with the ordinary in recipes that will impress your friends and, perhaps more importantly, your taste buds. In addition to the slideshows and the recipes, Food & Wine offers plenty of tips and advice to make your Thanksgiving as wonderful as can be. As the name suggests, the Ultimate Thanksgiving Guide is certainly a great resource if you plan to make this Thanksgiving something above and beyond the call of duty.

If you still have not found what you are looking for through all of these wonderful websites, do not panic: there are still plenty of resources out there. Cooking Cache offers a no-nonsense interface that allows you to clearly see each and every recipe, along with its user rating on a one-to-five star basis. Kitchenlink is another great place to look if you want to sift through a whole bunch of recipes to find exactly the right one: the home page links you directly to the categories of recipes that you can look through. If all of these websites fail you, use a search engine to pinpoint exactly what it is you are looking for in a Thanksgiving recipe and chances are you will be able to find what you seek. Of course, there is always the possibility of building upon a recipe that you find on one of these websites or modifying it to better suit your needs – your Thanksgiving feast should always have some little aspect of “you” in each and every dish since that is what makes the holiday so special. The perfect Thanksgiving recipe is out there and it is up to us to find it!