Opinion: Your hot takes on the most overrated and underrated foods

Macaroni and cheese is an abomination

If I had to pick one of the most overrated foods, it has got to be macaroni and cheese. I know, I know — shocking! One of the most beloved foods in the world, cherished by millions all over the globe, is hated by me, a writing teacher at San Diego State University.

The taste of that cheese on that pasta makes me gag. What’s with that texture? It’s gross! Slimy, gooey and icky! It blows my mind that people think this abomination of a “food” is something we should be drooling at the mouth over during the holidays, let alone during any time of the year. That cheese needs some flavor, yet there is not a single mac and cheese in the world that has flavor! Where is the flavor in mac and cheese? Have people lost their minds in the entirety of mac and cheese’s existence? Covering that pasta with that cheese produces a texture that has me baffled as to how anyone can have the taste buds for this failed experiment of a “food”! You want overrated? There you go! Mac and cheese: incredibly overrated!

Ending on a positive note, I do want to talk about food that is underrated, especially during the holidays, and it has got to be ambrosia. What an amazing fruit salad with great texture (unlike mac and cheese, which I refuse to classify as “food”). It has a nice assortment of fruits, a great pairing of marshmallows and cream, and the taste is just simply divine!

Why do people not give the same amount of love to ambrosia as they do to mac and cheese? Am I missing something here? This blows my mind! Eat more ambrosia, less mac and cheese!

Jacob Hubbard, Clairemont

Give me a perfect hot dog on a fresh bun

Gordon Ramsay clambers up a rock pillar during a snowstorm on the TV series “Uncharted.” He is after a culinary delicacy, Old Man’s Beard, a lichen that only grows on the tips of spruce trees and which is a prized ingredient in Alaskan cuisine.

What would I climb a rock pillar to reach? A perfect hot dog on a fresh bun! And not one of those skinless frankfurters with no “snap” when you bite into it. I want a frank with a skin that sends a drizzle of warm pork juiciness right down my chin.

If it’s Chicago style, I’ll take a poppy seed on that bun, a slice of pickle as long as my nose and, please, a nice sprinkle of diamond-shaped onions.

The hot dog on a bun can be handed across a row of cheering Padres fans or it can be slid through a Costco window. It can be reduced to rubber in a microwave.

But once the wiener is given its honor as a foodie’s delight, it deserves to rise to the top of the sandwich pantheon, if a sandwich is what it is.

Most overrated food: cow’s milk as a beverage. No contest.

Regina Morin, Ocean Beach

Cinnamon in stuffing? You read that right.

Undoubtedly, I would imagine that there would be a lack of anticipation for someone outside of California to state their case for the most underrated holiday foods, but this topic was too good to resist! I hope all of the staff gets quite a kick out of this essay being penned by someone who has yet to visit the beautiful San Diego area, who grew up way across the country and still lives here. Over 3,000 miles away, to be exact. In a town outside of Boston.

At my family’s Thanksgiving table, we have two kinds of stuffing. One that I prepare that is often deemed more “traditionally American,” with apples, celery, sage and sausage. As both the child and grandchild of a Greek immigrant, the second is my late grandmother’s recipe, which is usually prepared by either her daughter or granddaughter (my mother and sister, respectively). This stuffing features an interesting mélange of ingredients with a decidedly Southern European influence: chestnuts, pine nuts, ground beef, golden raisins and cinnamon.

What? Cinnamon? In stuffing? Did I read that correctly? That is not a typo, folks.

Greek and Middle Eastern cuisine frequently incorporates warming spices into savory dishes (for example, cinnamon and cloves often go into pasta sauces, particularly for those in layered casseroles such as pastitisio and moussaka). In fact, I would classify the very usage of these in something savory to be underrated. Around this time of year, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom and allspice are ubiquitous in desserts, and they are all delightful, but if you haven’t tried a stuffing with a bit of sweetness thanks to ground cinnamon or a Greek-style spaghetti sauce with a smattering of ground cloves or several cinnamon sticks floating in the saucepan, you will be in for quite a tasty surprise.

For those familiar with Greek culture (and, for the record, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was humorously accurate in its depiction of how we regard mealtime and festivities), the notion of filoxenia — hospitality — takes precedence in any type of gathering. At the table for any given event, there is such a bounty of dishes crowding the entire surface, it’s amazing that the place settings even fit. No matter if there are six people or 26, it’s about welcoming friends and family into your home and sharing a laugh as you break bread. Adhering to the tenets of filoxenia — translated as “friend to the stranger” — under no circumstance do you leave hungry. Even if you ate only an hour before you came over, food will be going on your plate. That’s how we make you feel appreciated, to show how much we value you.

Whether or not you find a food to be overrated, underrated or something else, it all comes down to what the holidays embody for many: that sense of belonging, comfort, nostalgia, and a deep connection to those we love are never underrated.

Katy Kostakis, Malden, Massachusetts

Garlic and salt are overrated, overused

To me, the natural flavor of vegetables is underrated. All vegetables are delicious with just a light dash of salt and butter or oil. I have read that frozen vegetables keep their nutritional value and could not be easier to cook. I have been disappointed in vegetarian restaurants that serve vegetables in heavy soy sauce or hot spices. Plain fruit is from heaven.

To me, caviar is overrated. Shad roe is delicious and also a caviar (fish eggs), yet much cheaper and not so salty as sturgeon caviar. According to the web, high-quality caviar has less salt, but I have no interest in spending big bucks to find out if I like the pricier stuff.

Garlic barely appeared in my early cookbook (1963) and now is much overused. My brother told of going to a movie where a couple seated behind him was breathing garlic. Before a concert, my husband and I went to a restaurant for a light dinner. But the meal was so loaded with garlic that later it was embarrassing to be breathing garlic onto the people in the row in front of us.

To me, salt also is overrated and overused in just about all food. I understand the use of salt in bar snacks to get people to drink more. Yet what purpose does heavy salt have in a restaurant meal? One eatery described its food as aggressively salted. To me, it was inedible. If a customer needs more salt, it should be easy to provide and, of course, it could not be less expensive. A man from Europe told me of being served extremely salty food while in a forced labor camp (the saltiness prevented adequate eating). Such tactics are hardly necessary in this land of abundance.

Puffy plastic bags full of salt, fat and who knows what else are way overpriced and much overrated. Popcorn is an underrated, healthy snack, cheap and easily made. With just a few minutes in the microwave (or stove top), popcorn preparation takes less time than heating fatty, expensive snacks. Nuts and cooked garbanzo beans are also delicious, healthy foods, as is a microwaved baked potato. Lightly salted radish slices on buttered toast or sliced, hard-boiled eggs in cooked spinach are good snacks needing minimal preparation. A stove-top cheese sandwich has no peer.

Underused is the old-fashioned meat tenderizer — a pounding hammer. At the Met restaurant in New York, I ordered pork chops that were too tough to be edible. Instead of spending big bucks on tender cuts of meat, the pounding tenderizer can make tough, inexpensive meat tasty.

An old story: A nobleman was bemoaning that sardines are delicious but so cheap, and, because of his high station, he could not serve them. Sardine sandwiches are quick, delicious and easy.

Homemade is underrated compared to factory-packaged food (all those mysterious ingredients) — or even a restaurant meal (ingredients not required to be listed), because at home, sanitation is not a question.

Daina Krigens, Encinitas

Best traditions? Those you can eat

I’ve already held that traditions are the glue that really bind a family together. And some of the best traditions emanate from the kitchen, with our taste buds transporting us back to a delicious time.

I’ve been wanting to recreate my Mama’s classic German Christmas cookies, vanillekipferl and lebkuchen, since she stopped baking after the 2004 holiday season, three years before her death at 86. But I could never decipher her handwritten recipes.

Finally, this year I tried the Internet, and was able to recreate the cherished cookies of many Christmases past, all the while playing the same vintage Christmas music she loved to hear while baking (thanks to eBay, and, yes, on vinyl: We’re talking Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Robert Goulet, Mahalia Jackson and even Jim Nabors). The sounds and smell washed over me as I was baking and it was a different time, a different place, as my mind entertained visions of Mama and her scarred wooden rolling pin, flattening the aromatic, honeyed lebkuchen dough on one of those pullout carving boards every kitchen came with in the 1960s and 1970s ... pressing out the candy canes and Christmas trees and snowmen and reindeer and putting them in the oven while mixing the icing, powdered sugar mixed with egg and vanilla extract, and then laying out row after row of fresh cookies on sheets of wax paper that covered our dining room table. Then the cookies were put into round tins, not to be eaten for two or three weeks until they finished “resting.” It all came back to me, and it was so much fun that I did it again the next night, and the next.

I’m not the only one in our family following tradition. Before she died, my Mama taught my wife, Diana, how to prepare a goose dinner, which we always had in lieu of turkey on Thanksgiving. And Diana is now an accomplished goose-cooker and also excels at red cabbage (with bacon) and potato dumplings.

And watching my 3-year-old granddaughter chomp down on a goose leg reminds me of when my own three boys were young and did the same — and then I go back into an old photo album and there from 1961 is a picture of me at 3 doing the same exact thing, goose fat dripping down my cheek. We maintain other traditions as well: opening gifts on Christmas Eve after a half-hour walk while “Santa” comes (even though my sons are now 19, 23 and 26); going on huge summer road trips with stays in national parks and cheap roadside motels; and family excursions on Sundays to places like Cabrillo National Monument, the Embarcadero (I still remember the huge tuna fleets) and of course Balboa Park.

But the best traditions are those you can bake, cook and eat.

T.K. Arnold, Carlsbad

NEXT WEEK’S YOUR SAY:

On your favorite, least favorite holiday movies

Holiday-themed movies are an American tradition. What are your favorite and least favorite holiday films, and why? Please email your 500-word essay to yoursay@sduniontribune.com by Wednesday and we may publish it in the newspaper and online. Include your name, city or San Diego neighborhood and a daytime phone number.