Hi,
Almost anything to modify the skin is going to be in css. If there is markup you want to include on every page, you can put that in the layout.master file.
Currently you cannot move the rating nor change its label easily but that is good feedback I will ponder for future versions.
We don't have a built in web counter but we have built in support for google analytics which is a free service that can give you much more detailed reports than a web counter.
Currently the rating comments are not visible anywhere unless you look directly in the database. I'm actually planning to build a new comment system so we can attach comments to any content instance or page. One of the problems with the rating comments is you mostly get spam from automated scripts.
As far as meta data, you really do want to put a specific an unique meta description on every page for maximum SEO, but if the content of the page is good SEO will generally work out anyway. Meta keywords have been so abused historically that they are pretty much ignored by search indexes these days.
To keep your menu from getting out of hand consider first creating category pages for recipes and the hang the actual recipe pages beneath those.
See this recent thread for a similar question about site logo vs site title.
Hope it helps,
Joe