Is your family totally devoted to canned cranberry sauce, despite all your best efforts to sway them to the world of orange-scented homemade compote? If so, maybe you're looking for a way to spice up that cranberry sauce (because serving it in the shape of the can does leave something to be desired). Paula Deen, in her trademark over-the-top style, has come up with a new way of serving canned cranberry sauce. Here's how she described it in a USA Today column.

"I gave a twist to cranberry sauce one year. You take a can of the jellied sauce and slice it in quarter-inch pieces. Then you mix up cream cheese and hot sauce and a little mayo, and you make up sandwiches - no bread, just the cheese mix in between cranberries."

Sounds like an interesting approach to cranberry sauce to me, although the purists would have a heart attack if you suggested adulterating their precious canned sauce with mayo and cream cheese.

Do you care what food is for sale at your hotel?

That's the question being asked over at USA Today's Hotel Hotsheet. Writer Kitty Bean Yancey (what a great name!) visited the prototype for Westin's new Element hotels. These longer-stay hotels are going to be a bit more upscale than your usual hotel, with fancy sheets, nice dinnerware, and great food.

An article in today's USA Today discusses how dieters face many pitfalls when shopping for diet-friendly foods in the grocery store, because there seems to be some confusion over what constitutes diet-friendly, "health" food.

Notice that I said "health" and "diet-friendly," as opposed to simply healthy foods. This is because the article isn't about increasing the proportion of nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables in the diet. It's about how dieters who eat things like YoCrunch's fun yogurts fail to loose weight. YoCrunch is a brand of low fat yogurt that comes with mix-ins that include crushed Oreo cookies, M&Ms and Reeses Pieces.

I'll venture out on a limb here and say that the dieters who believe that eating any product with candy mixed into is a "healthy" thing to eat are fooling themselves. Just because the yogurt is low fat, that doesn't mean that the crushed-up candy is, too. And beyond that, pretending that it is a "health food" is just silly. Is a product like YoCrunch better than, say, a deep fried Snicker's bar? Of course, but if that's your dieting criteria, you might have to reconsider before you actually lose any weight.

As we get further into spring, my meat-and-fire loving alter ego, Joey Deckle, comes to life ravenously craving barbecue. Specifically: cooking, eating and competing. Of course Joey and I aren't alone in our seasonal 'cue cravings.

USA Today recently asked Karen Adler, author of The BBQ Queens' Big Book of Barbecue, to select 10 of America's top barbecue joints. The most difficult thing about coming up with the list was narrowing it down to 10, she says. The roster ranges from such roadhouses as Dreamland Drive-In Bar-B-Cue (pictured), which limits its menu to ribs and white bread, to huge operations like Kreuz Market that specializes in shoulder clod and serves up its delicacies on butcher paper. For the most part, the list is made up of old-school Southern or Kansas City barbecue eateries. There is one notable exception: R.U.B., in New York City. Well shoot, seems like we Yankees can make good barbecue.

Here's the full lineup: Dreamland Drive-In Bar-B-Cue, Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, Decatur, Ala.; Hickory Hollow BBQ, Ellenton, Fla.; R.U.B., New York; Wilber's Barbecue, Goldsboro, N.C.; Goode Co. Bar.B.Q., Houston; Kreuz Market, Lockhart, Texas; The Bar-B-Q Shop, Memphis; Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue, Kansas City, Mo.; and  BB's Lawnside Bar-B-Q, Kansas City, Mo.

[photo: Southern Living]

The folks at Zagat recently compiled a list of the top 100 hotel restaurants in America for an article in USA TODAY. Ratings were based on food quality, décor and service. The French Room in The Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas, made the top of the list, which is available here. The list, complete with reviews, addresses and phone numbers, is also available for download as a notes file for your iPod. I went ahead and loaded it onto my iPod and, indeed, I was able to browse the list with my little scroll wheel. I'm not sure why this list needs to be on anyone's iPod, but nevertheless, it's available. Of the 100 restaurants listed, 20 are in California and 13 are in Massachusetts. At number three on the list is The Dining Room at Little Palm Island Resort (right), a luxury resort in the Florida Keys that can only be reached by boat. More complete Zagat guides are also available for other mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones.

Is grocery shopping the new national past time? Sometimes, it can certainly seem that way. With lines around the block at store openings for Trader Joe's and Whole Foods markets, one would think that the customers were lining up to see a Broadway show or a blockbuster movie, not to pick up a quart of milk and some specialty produce. Shoppers drive for hours to visit a Wegman's grocery in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland or Virginia - not only to get all the goodies they need to stock their kitchens, but for the fun of it. Cheese tasting, gourmet and artisan prepared goods and other foods, like sushi, prepared on the spot by skilled chefs are all draws of markets like these, whether their prices are high, low or midrange.

Why is shopping becoming entertainment, though? USA Today tried to answer that very question and found that the answer lay in a combination of factors. Americans are more interested in new and quality foods than ever before. They want healthier foods, international flavors and they want to find it all in one store because the long-standing tradition of one-stop shopping is the only kind that fits into a busy schedule. Consequently, the stores that offer everything do well, so well that people want to visit them more than other stores. "Nothing compares with it," a customer said of Wegman's. "You can spend an entire day there."

Out of all the food trends we heard about back in December and January, there was one that is clearly becoming a big deal on th packaged food scene: miniature packaging, aka 100-calorie packs. "100 calories!" seems to be the hot new slogan on food products these days. The past three years have seen the market for portion-controlled packets go from 0 to more than 25 different foods. USA Today reports that 18 of the new products were introduced in 2005 alone. With more coming along this year, there is no indication that this trend is slowing.

Some of the newer products include 100-calorie sodas from brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Shasta. These sodas have a mere 8-ounces per can, fewer than the more standard 12-ounces, and are marketed as being more portable than their full-sized counterparts. Coco-Cola says that they're marketed at consumers who wish to "improve their snacking and drinking opportunities."

After seeing the huge response we had from all of you readers about McDonald's new premium coffee, it is no surprise that others were curious about it as well as us here at Slashfood. USA Today decided to hold a taste test, pitting four widely available coffees against each other. Included in the test were the new premium blends from Burger King and McDonald's, as well as favorites from 7-11, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks. Dunkin Donuts is the least available variety of coffee, as there are very few store locations on the west coast, but the test was held in Manhattan where there appear to be plenty of all of the above coffee-shop types.

According to the USA Today survey, as of the time I am writing this, Starbucks was still the most popular based on readers' opinion. And they must have good taste, since Starbucks also won the taste test. Out of possible scores of "5 slurps," Starbucks ranked at 4 1/2, while McDonald's followed with 3 1/2 , Burger King with 2 1/2 and Dunkin Donuts and 7-11 with 2 slurps each. While Starbucks was also the most expensive drink in the test, the "dead-serious brew with an intense bitter chocolate aroma, a silky texture and a complex, fruity, almost wine-like flavor" made it worth it to the tasters. The other stores' coffees had flavors that ranged from "watery" to having "tobacco notes."

 

USA Today recently collected a list restaurants with high Zagat ratings near major U.S. airports. Their top pick was Chez Nous, less than 15 minutes away from Houston's George Bush Intercontinental. While the list offers one or two recommendations for about 20 U.S. airports, Zagat was stumped for good places near the terminals in Philly, Orlando and Detroit. On a similar note, Ask Metafilter today featured a thread about which airports around the world have the best food. So far, it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned Miami International's La Carreta, an excellent Cuban cafeteria in Concourse D.

Cookies and milk left out for Santa is Christmas Eve tradition that I like to follow in the event that Santa stops by and wants a snack as he travels the world delivering presents. I even set aside a few of the prettier cookies I decorated a day or two before to make sure I have some to leave out. Of course, he doesn't usually seem too interested in the cookies and I end up eating them myself on Christmas morning. Cookies left out overnight can, in my opinion, be deemed "leftovers" and, thus, are appropriate breakfast food.  USA Today says that 48% of people who leave snacks for Santa leave both cookies and milk. I am among the 29% that only leaves cookies, not because I believe Santa is lactose intolerant, as the makers of Lactaid would have me believe, but because milk left out overnight is not very appetising in the morning. If he didn't eat the cookies, Santa probably wasn't very thirsty anyway.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]