Getting through the work week is hard enough for most of us... but the minute Friday afternoon rolls around, there's a certain breed that face the weekend with a long list of "honey do" projects and household duties. Yes, the weekend warriors need iPhone app love too -- whether to help with those maintenance challenges, or find ways to make the break from the day job a bit more enjoyable. Here's a five app collection just for you, my brothers and sisters in the two-day sprint; enjoy.

Weber's On The Grill™ [iTunes link] for iPhone, at $4.99, would seem to be a bit pricey compared to other grill-centric cooking apps selling for $0.99 (dadoo's Grill Guide) or the large number of free and well-regarded cookbook apps on the store (check out Epicurious Recipies & Shopping List, for one). Nevertheless, if you're serious about getting the most out of your grill, the $5 you spend on this app will be well worth it.

Weber may be the world's largest grill manufacturer, but the relationship of Weber owners to their grills feels more personal than mass-marketed; in fact, the slightly obsessive and cultish fandom around the Weber brand may seem a wee bit familiar to, uh, owners of a particular company's computers, music players and cellphones. Ahem.

The iPhone app takes the Weber customer very seriously, providing a great collection of hundreds of recipes along with grilling technique guides (including videos from chef Jamie Purviance), time and temperature recommendations, a handy shopping list manager, and a convenient cooking timer right in the app. About the only thing that's missing is an optional meat thermometer to plug into the dock connector (which I would totally buy if they made one).

Getting this one in almost under the wire, MacGourmet Deluxe is currently on sale until the end of Saturday for $34.95 USD, about 30% off its normal retail price of $44.95.

We've covered MacGourmet Deluxe in the past, and it was actually Dave Caolo's post that motivated me to give the software a try. The software is touted as the "iTunes for your recipes," and it definitely doesn't disappoint in that area. I have a feeling if Julia Child was still alive, she'd be using this software to organize recipes, interface with iCal for planning meals and publishing cookbooks through the partnership with TasteBook. It's actually almost a bit overwhelming for someone whose cooking experience might be tossing together frozen pre-packaged meals from the grocery store and occasionally experimenting with Alton Brown recipes from Food Network's "Good Eats."

But the services that MacGourmet Deluxe is touting with this sale is the integrated nutritional resources. MacGourmet uses the USDA National Nutrient Database to analyze recipes and automatically updates the software as the USDA database is updated.

MacGourmet Deluxe requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher.

For those wavering on whether or not to purchase this software, the tipping point just might be the recently released MacGourmet app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. MacGourmet [link opens iTunes] will allow users to sync with the desktop version of the program to transfer recipes, shopping lists, and more in order to streamline meal planning. You can also create shopping lists from the recipes already on the app itself and comes with more than 200 recipes already built in. The MacGourmet app is $4.99 USD in the App Store and works with both MacGourmet Deluxe and the regular version of MacGourmet.

There are plenty of recipe applications for the Mac, and at first glance SousChef is like most of the others. However, it does have some fine-tuning and refinement that sets it apart from the pack. The thing I like most about SousChef is the ability to use your Mac to view recipes while cooking, without ever having to waste paper printing each individual recipe. This is accomplished through a Front Row-esque interface that lists your ingredients, and the cooking instructions -- It will even read your instructions to you while you are cooking. You can control the speech through a heads-up display that appears when you mouse over the bottom portion of your screen. You can also control this "10-foot mode" with your Apple or Keyspan remote.

SousChef interacts with an optional online database of other SC users to allow you to share your culinary creations. Each time you enter a new recipe, it can be sent to the database where others can look it up and create the same dishes you do. If you have a collection of secret family recipes, you can turn off sharing. It would be nice if this were available for each recipe, instead of affecting your entire library.

You can search through your recipes by ingredient; this allows you to find only the recipes that you can execute using the items you have on hand, without a trip to the store. You can search using multiple ingredients, and if you find an ingredient that you don't have, you don't need to make another shopping run -- just use SousChef's built-in substitutions. The application ships with several substitution suggestions, but you can also add your own in the preferences.



Read on for more ...

MacGourmet is a very nice recipe organizer for the Mac that we've written about several times. It's definitely a far cry from the home grown database I was running on my SE.

For the uninitiated, MacGourmet lets you organize your recipes and menus as you would expect. It also lets you publish of recipes online, assign ratings, pair certain dishes with favorite wines and more. Mariner calls it "iTunes for your recipes," and for good reason.

This week, Mariner released MacGourmet Deluxe 1.0. Changes include

• The Cookbook Builder, which allows users to build, print and share their own cookbook.
• A mealplan feature with iCal integration
• A new shopping list editor
• Several new award-winning recipes

MacGourmet Deluxe can be downloaded now for $44.95US, and requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher. Registered MacGourmet customers may upgrade to MacGourmet Deluxe for a reduced price.

YummySoup! 1.0 is a slick new recipe management app with a silly icon, and that's just the way I like my icons. This app incorporates an online library of recipes, full screen recipe display (which comes in hand when one is cooking), smart groups, and support for multiple shopping lists. The shopping list function is cool, you add recipes to your shopping list and then you can print it out or email it to yourself to make shopping a breeze. Sadly, it lists the ingredients per recipe, instead of aggregating them into one über-list, so if you have two recipes that call for a pound of chicken it doesn't like 2 pounds of chicken but rather 1 pound twice.

YummySoup! is Universal, has a 15 day trial, and costs $20 for a full license. Best of all, it isn't even in beta!

In all fairness, we saw Emeril do it first. Our friends at AdJab have discovered that Kraft has made more than 100 recipes available for download to your iPod in Notes form. Recipes include BBQ, drinks, desserts, sides and more. The portability is nice, I just wish there were a way to print these directly from the iPod. The screen is tiny, and my cooking area isn't always a safe place for my iPod to be.

The good news is, now I won't have to refer to the mayonnaise jar whenever I want to make that great potato salad.

[Via AdJab]