Trying to figure out what you’re going to do with half a leftover turkey and fifteen pounds of sweet potatoes? Yahoo wants to help you out with its newly-announced search shortcut for recipes.

The search is in the form of a syntax: just search for an ingredient and the word recipes and you’ll get links to recipes and cuisine types at the top of the search results page. A search for mushroom recipes, for example, returns Sausage and Mushroom Soup, Tofu with Tomato-Mushroom Sauce, and other recipes from Food & Wine and EatingWell.com. (Currently 14 different providers are being used for the recipes.) Recipes have ratings, and some of the listings I saw (beef recipes) broke out the available recipes into cuisines.

Multiple-word queries get mixed results. If, for example, I try chicken and mushroom recipes, I will get recipe links at the top of the results page. chicken and avocado recipes brings just regular search results, however.

In addition to searching for ingredients you can also search for types of cuisine. A search for Italian olive recipes found goodies like Rosemary Focaccia with Olives and Osso Buco with Tomatoes, Olives, and Gremolata. Alas, Italian olive and chicken recipes did not provide a shortcut.

There are also some special dietary considerations you can use in your search as well, though they appear more limited. Try low fat recipes, or vegan recipes, or kosher recipes, or gluten free recipes. You can search for types of recipes, within reason. Try stew recipes or greens recipes. I also had a limited amount of success searching by cooking method — broil recipes or deep fried recipes.

The only bad thing about this shortcut is that it doesn’t seem able to handle lots of ingredients. I guess if I look in the fridge and all I have is an onion, some leftover ham, and a half-a-jar of olives, I could use Cookin’ With Google or a regular Web search. On the other hand, if I need a quick recipe for a mud pie and don’t need to fool with ingredients, this Yahoo shortcut is fast and useful!