Hot dog!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I’m a simple man with simple tastes. A while back my wife and I went out with some friends with slightly more exotic ideas about dining out. Don’t get me wrong. The food was very good and it’s fine to get a little fancy every now and then, but thinking about the bill, I couldn’t help but think how much, say, Taco Bell or Chick-fil-A that same amount of money could have bought instead.

Which got me thinking about delicious vs. cost and the real “taste value” of different foods. By the way, “taste value” is a term I just made up but it sounds like something you’d hear on some cooking blog or whatever.

Anyway, I’ve written columns in the past about my predilection for things like peanup butter sandwiches and cheeseburgers and even deviled eggs. All of those are pretty low-end food

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From page A4

items in terms of cost but all three have pretty high “yum factors” (which, I’ve just decided as I’m typing this, is how one should measure “taste value”).

There are other “cheap” foods with big flavors. A good crisp pickle is quite tasty. Nachos can get pretty fancy but a basic chips-n-dip setup is a treat. Same for your basic pizza. It’s pretty inexpensive and even bad pizza is pretty OK. There’s a line I heard somewhere: “Pizza is like sex. Even when it’s bad, hey it’s still pizza.”

But I think the king of the “taste value” foods has to be the humble hot dog. Even in its most humble form — a weiner on a bun, with maybe some mustard — it’s pretty delicious. And you can dress it up all sorts of ways, like with chili and cheese, with relish and onions, you can grill it, you can boil it, you can even nuke it in the microwave. You can get a pretzel bun or a foot-long, all-beef premium kosher frankfurter, and it’s still delicious… and still well within the low range of price — unless you’re at one of those places that likes to jack up the cost of everything because they’ve got a captive audience, like a movie theatre, a ballgame or an amusement park.

Although I do have to admit, I still don’t understand why hot dogs come in packs of 10 but buns come in packs of eight.

I don’t get hot dog math…