"USA Today" news and stories

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.

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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.

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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]

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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.