A: It’s a master scheduler for cooking your meal ... with the ability to time and stage each dish on your menu so that everything is ready to eat when you are.

A: Tap the top left cutting board on the main screen to set your meal time. You can either choose the time you want to eat, or let the app calculate the earliest time your meal will be ready based on the foods you are preparing.

A: You can add a food to your menu from the main screen by clicking on the Add Food button. Using the Edit button, you can delete an individual food. The Clear Meal button allows you to clear the entire menu at once.

A: When’s Dinner?™ will pause your current stage, but will continue to count down any inactive stages. That way if you have a cake in the oven or ice cream chilling in the freezer, those stages will continue to completion.

A: When you plan your meal, the app looks at the time you want to eat and which dish will take the longest to complete. It assumes there is only one cook in the kitchen, and that you may have multiple ovens. Working backward, the app knows that active stages cannot overlap—but inactive stages can. So while your cake is baking, you can be working on your entrée.

A: Yes. The Food Library saves your foods here so they’ll be available the next time you want to prepare them.

A: Yes. For each recipe, group those activities that require you be in the kitchen into a single stage, such as Prep. An example: Some recipes break down a recipe into minute- by-minute detail ... Sauté onions for 5 minutes, then add mushrooms and sauté for 10 minutes ... But the net effect is that you have to be in the room for all of it. That entire time you have to be attentive to the dish should be considered as a single stage.

A: You can also give yourself extra breathing room by adding additional minutes between stages.