"rating" news and stories

It has been several years since the lever corkscrew design first catapulted to popularity, going from a gadget that was almost strictly for big wine drinkers to a staple in any home that also has a bottle or two of red. The style was popularized by the Metrokane Rabbit corkscrew, but there are any number of similarly designed openers available today. The last time that Cook's Illustrated put these openers to the test was about 9 years ago and in their most recent issue, they decided that it was time to revisit them and see how some of the more expensive brands stacked up to some of the less expensive newcomers.

Their "ultimate opener" was the Screwpull Trigger from Le Creuset, which has a unique mechanism that adds an extra grip to the cork, ensuring a fast and clean uncorking. But out of the 13 models, 12 made a respectable showing, so CI's conclusion seems to be that you will do fine with almost any lever-style wine opener. Their advice, if you're not going for their "ultimate" model, is to try to select openers with longer handles, which will make removing the corks easier.

Quite often, the things on which Consumer Reports reports don't make it online (or it's by subscription only), but since they tested casual dining restaurants - one of the most popular sectors of dining - it's no surprise that the story has popped up. Casual dining restaurants range from lower priced Cracker Barrel and Denny's to more upscale chains, like Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. They're popular because not only do they offer a familiar option to hungry patrons, but you generally know exactly what you're going to get and how much it costs before you walk in the door. This can be a huge asset for diners on a budget.

CR grouped the chains by the type of food they offered and their price level, then rated them based on the survey results from 66,000 readers who ate 149,000 meals over the course of a year. If you're familiar with the magazine, you already know that they go into great detail on all the things that they review, so this piece doesn't even cover half of the info in the article. To get the full story, pick up a copy the next time you're out at the newsstand, but I'll share their quick picks for special occasions, where the food and service justify higher prices, and "good food at a good price", where price and quality hit an equilibrium:

Toasters have been around for more than 100 years and the Slate took on the task of testing eight toasters to see which one was really the toast of the town. Using a highly scientific scale which judged toasting quality, ease of use, cleanup and value, the toasters were put to the test. After too many loaves of bread to count, the results were in. The high-end toasters like the DeLonghi Aluminum 2-Slice and the KitchenAid Pro Line 2-Slice finished with the best scores, though they were low in the "value" category. Generally, the less expensive toasters, like the T-Fal Avanté Deluxe 4-Slice and Michael Graves 2-Slice, did not perform as well as their more expensive counterparts.

Their list is a great way to start a toaster search, but Cooking.com and Amazon.com's customer reviews also provide great feedback.

Source

I've never been a big fan of frozen, boxed or (ugh) canned macaroni and cheese. If ever I do want to do some research before making an attempt to like those nasty little elbows, now I know where to turn: curlypasta.co.uk. Apparently, over in the U.K., the conjunction gets dropped and it's just macaroni cheese. See? This has already been a learning experience.

The site features dozens of reviews of mac n' cheese which rate the products on "cheesyness," "plasticity," and "consistency." Each review also includes a ratio of pasta to cheese. There's even a leader board to keep track of which brands rank highest.

Incidentally, Heinz got an overall 4 out of 5.

Sometimes restaurant reviews seem to skew towards the negative - so why bother reading them when you can get the gist from the headline? The Seattle Post Intelligencer critic stepped up to try and answer that very question this week. The headlines are only a glimpse of what the review was about and a half dozen words, except in very rare cases, is hardly capable of conveying the full experience that a review offers. Another potentially misleading element of a review is the number of stars or the numerical rating it received. A subjectively determined numerical value will give you even less information than the headline alone because you can't get a sense of the criteria used to justify the rating.

Newspapers tend to review new restaurants, which are more likely to be hit-or-miss on any given day during their infancy than a meal at a long lasting neighborhood favorite. Their kitchen might not be fully synched or perhaps they haven't settled on a menu of their best dishes. Time can change a restaurant for better or worse, and an early review may not tell the whole story.