There's a little Pulldown arrow under the "Plane" button on the ribbon bar. If you expand that, there's a few options to create planes tangent to surfaces. I usually use the "Tangent to Surface and Parallel to Plane" option, and use my X Y Planes.
EDIT: You'll want to go to your browser on the left and expand your origin folder to find your X Y Z planes, and you can click on the appropriate one of those (remembering that it's going to project a plane parallel to the plane you select, and tangent to the surface you select.)
