I cannot tell a lie: Google really let me down this year. If only it had introduced its Google with Recipe View a few days earlier, I’d have had the means to concoct dishes like the Lincoln Log, the Chicken in Every Pot Pie, and the Cherry Cheesecake Pie for my annual Presidents Day party. I could have known, with a casual click of the finger, what holiday appropriate foodstuffs can be prepared in 15 minutes or less, what has less than 300 calories per serving, and what ingredients are conducive to bringing it all together.

I mean, of course I wound up using Google’s regular tried-and-true search algorithm to get a general idea of what would work for the snacks and entrees my guests would be enjoying during the evening’s festivities. (You need to keep people entertained and well-fed between Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Jefferson and Millard Fillmore Karaoke, obviously.) But having a search designated specifically for recipes — as we’ve long had for images, videos, news, and shopping — really would have made a world of difference in my chaotic kitchen on that fateful February evening.

Kavi Goel, Product Manager at Google, writes: “Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup, which we first introduced at Searchology in 2009. If you’re a recipe publisher, you can add markup to your webpages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View. Recipe View is part of our ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data, and this release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since it’s [the] first time we’ve built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data.”

What will Google think of next? Google with Where to Hide the Body View? Google with UFO Sightings View? Google with Quirky Roadside Attractions View? All very useful to the right demographics, surely — but recipes? Everyone’s got to eat. Google seems to know what we need before we, ourselves, know. At least it got around to giving us Google with Recipe View in plenty of time for me to start working on my Shrove Tuesday fattening up plans.