Online recipe and cooking sites are hot commodities right now and - if last year's stats are any indication - are not likely to see any decrease in traffic before the end of the year.

In 2008, the first and highest peak in visits to these sites took place on the days before Christmas and Thanksgiving - the second happened three to four days prior to the holidays, according to Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, who guest posted Blogspot earlier this month.

Christmas vs. Thanksgiving

Traffic lead up to Thanksgiving is relatively short - beginning in mid-October - compared with Christmas, which ramps up in November and doesn’t stop until year's end, Dougherty also noted. "Last year, over the four weeks ending Dec. 27, 2008, the share of paid search reached 32%, highlighting increased competition for sponsored links during the Christmas holidays vs. Thanksgiving," she wrote.

Community Sites

Online cooking and recipe sites have been preparing for this holiday season as much as retailers have. Most of the well-known food sites have upgraded their content with new recipes and - in many cases - social networking tools. Scripps Networks' FoodNetwork.com, for example, includes how-to videos featuring Food Network talentIna Garten, Giada De Laurentiis and Alton Brown. Visitors also can see Thanksgiving preparation questions answered on air during "Dear Food Network" Thanksgiving episodes.

There is also a contest on the site - the All-Star Green Bean Casserole Sweepstakes. It enables visitors vote for their favorite green-bean casserole recipe to win a grand prize of $4,000 cash.

For its part, Allrecipes.com, has enhanced its Recipe Box, which allows members to share personal recipe collections and view the Recipe Boxes of fellow members. Other new features let members to save custom recipes, web links and references in addition to keeping track of fellow members with similar tastes by adding them to a "Cooks I Like" list.

Another tool  lets users change the servings of a recipe - say for two people instead of four - and the ingredients will scale appropriately in the Shopping List.

The Basics

For novice chefs, Butterball Turkey has maintained the 1-800-BUTTERBALL (1-800-288-8372) for 29 years. More recently it began offering text messages and support from its website Butterball.com in addition to live chats.