For most people, I imagine, Thanksgiving is all about the convergence of family and food. It’s one of the few times of the year when certain dishes make their appearance, and more often than not, those dishes have come down the generations, following familial lines as surely as the gene for eye color or hair texture, and with much the same result: your family’s food traditions are unique to your family. Sure, everyone has eyes… but your eyes might be your Great Uncle Frank’s eyes… and a particular dish might be something that lots of families enjoy, but your family has a way of making it that’s unique to you and yours.

For example, Anne has spent much of the day making from-scratch rolls to go with our holiday meal this afternoon… but they’re not just “from-scratch rolls” in her mind. They’re her Grandma Memmott’s rolls. And while Anne has her grandmother’s recipe (lovingly preserved in a battered old cookbook filled with recipes from all the ladies of the small-town LDS ward where her grandmother lived), it’s taken her some experimentation to figure out exactly how to make the recipe work, because her grandma is no longer here to walk her through it. The inevitable passage of time has made the connection with her family tradition a bit more tenuous, a bit more imperfect.

But we’re living in a time when technology can help resolidify those connections. At least, that’s one of the exciting possibilities of a new venture under development by my friend Jill and her husband Torgny. It’s a digital cookbook called Foodles.

Now, before you say “meh, another recipe site, like there aren’t a million of those,” hear me out.

Foodles is a recipe site, but it’s got a lot of built-in functionality that is unlike any such site I’ve run across before. One feature I find especially exciting is the ability to embed personal notes, photographs and even video into the recipe. Imagine if Anne had video of her grandma actually making these rolls, walking the viewer through all the steps that she used to follow (but maybe didn’t think to write down when that ward cookbook was compiled, for whatever reason). Best of all, imagine being to relive time spent in the kitchen with your loved ones who are longer here. This has to the potential to preserve more than a list of ingredients; it can preserve the personal nuances that truly make a dish “Grandma’s,” or “Uncle Frank’s,” or even “Anne’s.” And it can ensure that your loved ones live on in some form, right there in the kitchen with you.

Jill and Torgny have a lot of other good ideas, too — tools that add convenience and help modernize some recipes, like nutritional facts that adjust automatically to show you what happens if you replace ingredients. There are privacy settings so you can limit your recipes and other content only to your family, or share them with the world. And you can create an actual printed cookbook for your family, too. I sincerely think there’s a lot of potential here.

But of course they need help to make it a reality. I know the Christmas shopping frenzy is about to begin in only a few short hours and money is always tight this time of the year, so I hope you’ll forgive the sales pitch… but at the same time, when better to bring this up than on Thanksgiving Day, when we are the most conscious of family and food? I urge everyone reading this to check out their Kickstarter page… watch the video of Jill explaining all this in her own words, read the details for yourself, and consider backing them, if you can.

And now, I’m going to go sop up some gravy with those Grandma Memmott rolls…  Happy Thanksgiving, y’all, and happy shopping if Black Friday is your thing (personally, I plan to watch a lot of DVDs tomorrow!)