Meet The Team / Nanette Maxim

Thinking of switching from a classic potato chip or corn chip to one that claims to be healthier? Before you give up the Fritos, have a look at Healthcastle.com's amazingly helpful nutritional comparison of 40 top brands, reports NPR. You may be surprised at what those "better-for-you" chips actually save in the fat and calories departments.

Take Lay's Classic potato chips (ok, I admit it, they're my personal fave, so that's where I looked first) compared with Corazona's Slightly Salted Chips. Corazona's chips have 30 fewer calories for a one-ounce serving (let's just pretend we eat only an ounce), and 4 fewer grams of fat, but both have zero trans fats and sugars. And Corazona's are higher in carbs by 3 grams. So if it's a calories-and-fat battle you're waging, you might as well stick with the Lay's. But sodium? Lay's has double, with 180 mg. to Corazona's 90. (And yes, corazón, means "heart" in Spanish.)

Starbucks -- which today celebrates 40 years in the coffee biz -- may be solidly middle aged but, with a few new products launching, they'd prefer to think of it as the prime of life.

Going global for Starbucks means it's debuting its revamped Siren logo, in four stores: the Solana store in Beijing, Avenue de l'Opéra in Paris, Brompton Road in London, and Times Square in New York City (plus a special launch in Seattle).

But enough of the Siren. What about the coffee? See the new brews and Starbucks giveaway after the jump.

"Fat Tuesday" may be tomorrow, but Mardi Gras celebrations are already in full swing, from Rio to New Orleans to New York. On this Fat Monday the Hurricanes are flowing, the King Cakes are being baked and frosted, and gumbo is simmering in more than a few pots. (For more on the history of the day, see "Mardi Gras 2011: Fat Tuesday and Carnival Explained," at AOL News.) Take some ideas from these cooks, and get your own Cajun-Creole party started.

Louisiana native (and KitchenDaily contributor) Alexis Touchet lays out all the essentials for Mardi Gras, including quintessentially southern recipes for Creole Chicken Fricassee, Crawfish Pie, Chicken-and-Shrimp File Gumbo, Shrimp Remoulade Garlic Toasts, and Coconut Rum Cream Tarts. No New Orleans Mardi Gras feast would be complete without a big old dish of red beans and rice. Alexis adds spicy andouille sausage to her recipe to amp up the flavor.

In New Orleans, so popular are red beans and rice that now there's a Redbeans Parade (held today), with 60 members of a krewe that has honored the dish by spending months creating their costumes using the legumes (uncooked, natch).

Food poisioning usually means a few hours of gut-wrenching unpleasantness, but what if the consequences are more dire? A recent dealth in France has people wondering: Should the law step in?

When French teenager Benjamin Orset died from food poisoning in January, the cause was traced to a meal he'd eaten the day before his death at a Quick burger joint in Avignon, reports UPI. Now the manager of that restaurant faces not only accusations that hygiene standards were ignored, but charges of involuntary homicide.

In our search for the best of the best of fast-casual restaurant menus, we've sampled Applebee's Appetizers and Outback Steakhouse Favorites. We've given you our picks for TGI Friday's Sizzling Skillets, and Red Lobster Shrimp. Now we figured it was time to put some all-American burgers to the test, courtesy of Ruby Tuesday.

Menu Overview
We dug into all six of Ruby Tuesday's handcrafted premium beef burgers (we're saving the Veggie, Turkey, and Crab premium burgers for another taste test). Triple Prime burgers are a blend of ground tenderloin, sirloin, and ribeye, and are offered plain, with Cheddar cheese, and with Cheddar and applewood-smoked bacon. We also test-drove the Boston Blue (with blue cheese, onion rings, and barbecue sauce), the Smokehouse Burger (Cheddar, bacon, onion rings, and barbecue sauce), and the Alpine Swiss (with Swiss cheese and baby portabello mushrooms). All burgers come with lettuce, tomato, and garlic-mayo toppings, are served on a potato bun, and with a side of pleasantly crisp and well-salted "endless fries." Yes, spud lovers, it's fries till you pull the trigger. (We ordered all burgers cooked to medium doneness.)

See our winner, runner-up, and loser after the jump.