Basically what I want is to get the associated planks block for a log, and how I plan on doing this is getting the shapeless crafting recipe output of a list containing the log.  Looking into it there seems to be some stuff about a craftMatrix, I'm not quite sure how to acheive what I want to acheive though.  Thanks in advance your your help!

I've never done it but you should be able to iterate through the global ForgeRegistries.RECIPES array and find the one for Log .

If anyone needs the answer, this is what I did:

				for (IRecipe recipe : CraftingManager.REGISTRY) {				
					if (recipe.getIngredients().size() == 1) {
						if (recipe.getIngredients().get(0).test(item)) {