If you loved the Pla-Doh Fun Factory as a child, then you’re a great candidate for a juicer. Feed something in and it comes out as something else. It makes work feel like play.

Days of meticulous work squeezed into one long evening late in the summer when some beloved old friends gathered to  test juicers for Fine Cooking magazine (the issue is currently on the newsstand). We put a mountain of fruits and vegetables into the maws and hoppers of more than a dozen of these contraptions. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Seriously, it’s like a Fun Factory that turns out the healthiest imaginable beverage.

Here was the oddest looking juicer, dubbed Marvin, the paranoid android in Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

With the weather so hot, and so much juice on hand, what else could we do but make refreshing bellinis, watermelon daiquiris and cherry popsicles? Kale juice and beet juice, though — we had to draw the line. Beets are very dirtlike in flavor , so we crossed them off the happy hour menu, and kale juice is just the very taste of extreme personal self-discipline.  Nothing wrong with that, but that’s what January is for.

The competition came down to factors like ease of cleaning, size of footprint and perceived sturdiness. Because every one of those juicers made floods of juice in seconds, which is basically what you want in a juicer.

Do you go through phases with magazines? I bet I’ve subscribed and unsubscribed to Outside, Esquire and Gourmet three times each. After a few years, the tone and approach seem homogenous and I look for a new perspective. There have been similar phases with Cook’s Illustrated, Food & Wine, and Cooking Light.

At this moment, I’m in love with Saveur for its narrative and its focus on a cuisine embedded in a culture, and Fine Cooking for its attention to detail (and also the occasional assignment they throw my way). I love this month’s feature on burgers — every mag has a burger feature this summer, but none has as good a burger as Fine Cooking’s Mexican Black Bean Burger with Tomatillo & Avocado Salsa. My burger turned out identical to the magazine’s, except their photo was in focus and mine was not.

I learn something in every issue, which isn’t true for every culinary magazine. There was a taste test of olive oils grouped by flavor profile, which is a great idea, since I enjoy some types of olive oil and dislike others. I learned why the edges of microwaved foods get so hot while the center is cold. Discovered that “sushi grade” fish isn’t a real designation, just a marketing term. Learned how to make my own seasoned rice vinegar — it always seemed as if it would be simple, and it is.

Our plum tree bears plums every few years, and they’re too tart to enjoy fresh. When you look around for plum recipes, you get pretty much the same five cakes, a tart, and an ice cream recipe. But FC offered recipes with updated flavors and techniques like caramelized plums atop cinnamon-walnut shortcakes; a plum tart in a lemon shortbread crust, and Plum Coffeecake with Brown Sugar & Cardamom Streusel, which I made last weekend.

On newsstands this week is the September issue, including a test of grill woks, 19 of which shared our house for several weeks this spring.

Right around the time I realized that my kitchenware is lame, my friend Lisa at Fine Cooking was looking for a reviewer for box graters. It sounded like fun. I grate a lot of stuff, I like writing about food, and, let’s just be honest, I expected there would be extra graters after the testing.

After identifying about 30 graters and getting samples of about 20, Lisa and I outlined the features and performance we wanted in a grater, and we set the tests: shredding pottaoes, grating hard cheese, shredding semi-hard cheese and zesting lemons. The magazine requires that testing be done side by side, so that all the graters share the same conditions. Once the graters were assembled in one place, it was pretty clear this was a big, a really “grate” big effort. Thank goodness for Lesleyeats. Four hours, 5 pounds of potatoes, a good scrubbing, then 3 pounds of Wisconsin-made vegetarian aged cheese called Sarvecchio (found by Lesley at Whole Foods) uncovered a couple of standouts and a winner among our graters.

The next day a very culinary neighbor came to help with Round 2 — lemon zest and Cheddar cheeses. Another 4 hours, a couple dozen organic lemons and a couple of big blocks of Cheddar yielded two different standouts and another clear winner. You can read all about it in the May issue of Fine Cooking magazine.

Lots of grated foods left from those days. The Sarvecchio became alfredo, the potatoes went into ham and potato bake. The lemon peel is soaking in a jar of Everclear. The SOC (shredded orange cheese) is in bags in the freezer — I’m waiting for the right moment — what would be the best use for it?

And what became of the graters? I think that will be pretty clear around the gift-giving holidays.