It’s a fun joke, but not really meaningful; you could say that flour must be nasty because people never eat it raw with a spoon.
Spinach is (I think) a decent vegetable when it’s raw in a salad, or very lightly steamed, with a little butter, but spinach combined with cheese and spiced with a little nutmeg is better than any of the components are on their own. Same with most of the vegetables where bacon is added; synergy is a thing; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Cilantro is weird. It doesn’t exactly taste like soap to me, but it has a fairly strong flavor that isn’t particularly welcome to my buds. And it seems like it was something all the salsa makers decided to include en masse on a Thursday or something. All of a sudden it seemed like it was in everything. Then when the groceries started to charge 6 bucks for a small jar of tomatoes, started to make my own.
I’m a weird case with cilantro. I definitely taste the soapy flavor, but it’s in so many things that I like that I’ve grown to like it anyway (as long as there’s not too much of it).
And yet I have the reverse. I grew up (6yo to 17yo) in southern NM. Cilantro was in any salsa or pico, and when I spent time in Colorado (where I now live) the only common salsa was some form of red paste with the most mild heat (Pace Picante). Finding cilantro missing was just plain weird to me. 
But let us not do the battle over which sorts of “Mexican” food are authentic. If it tastes like soap to you, then I feel your frustration when it’s in the foods you want to eat. And, like you, I make my own 90% of the time because it’s just better.
Back to the rest of the thread:
I like my fresh or fresh-from-frozen spinach half-cooked or wilted in a hot skillet, with just a touch of butter or sesame oil, mixed with sauteed onion or garlic, topped with toasted sesame seeds if I’m going for a more Asian-inspired flair.
But the best spinach for me is a cooked Saag (Paneer optional) - which may or may not provide support for the OP. After all, while spinach is a key component of such a dish, it is certainly overwhelmed by the variety of (delicious) flavors that is the saag dish as a whole.
I love straight spinach, but saag is awesome. Food of the gods.
It’s good. But ambrosia? No. A paneer miss.
Just eat your vegetables, they’re good for you. Stop whining. If you don’t finish your carrots and peas, there’ll be no dessert.
For me, the “signal” that a food is not actually all that edible is the phrase “you have to cook it just right”.
Throwing on a ton of other stuff, strongly flavored sauces, etc. can be an indication of that.
I throw waiters off all the time when I ask for nothing on my salad. They go on and on about “How about some oil?” “Maybe a little lemon juice?” Etc. It gets really ridiculous. What part of “nothing on my salad” don’t they get? I like the taste of the salad greens, etc. So that’s all I want to taste.
Eh, there’s tons of rich sauces for good cuts. But I am of the opinion that there are no good cuts as long as you treat them right, slow braise the tougher ones (or “cook the hell out of it” if you prefer). But at that point many recipes are stews, so you have a sauce that’s mostly of the meat+any vegetables more than a bunch of fat, wine, and so on.
The hero responsible for this is named Hans van Doorn. It’s not so much that BS are all of a sudden “good” but that prior to his discovery, the good varieties were not supermarket-ready with low yields etc.
I know what you meant, but had to repeat this.
They’re double-plus ungood cuts.
[Mrs Olsen]That’s the richest kind. [/Mrs Olsen]
I don’t know… Calamari, for instance, is heavenly when done properly. Not “well, you can make it palatable”: If you give me a choice between good calamari and good almost any other food on the planet, I’ll choose the calamari. But you have to do it properly, because calamari done wrong is just rubber.
Though you do have a point for things like eggplant. Sure, eggplant is good if you bread it, deep-fry it, and then smother it in cheese and tomato sauce, but that’s not an endorsement of eggplant, because anything would be good if you did all that to it, and most things given that treatment would be considerably better than eggplant.
Ditto, except that the “soapy” flavor somehow became redefined in my head. The first few times I had salsas at Mexican restaurants here in the 90s, I kept thinking they didn’t rinse their dishes properly. But at some point, I just got used to the flavor that I don’t really associate it with soap any more. Same thing happened with me and Hershey’s. When I lived in Europe, I went something like six years or so without having Hershey’s milk chocolate. Then, one day back in the US, I have it and it distinctly has a vomit aftertaste to it. I google it and, sure enough, it’s a thing. It’s butyric acid. And when I say it had a vomit aftertaste, I mean just like after you throw up. Now? Back used to the flavor, I can’t pick up that bile-y or whatever flavor anymore, just some general tang.
I pretty much enjoy most veggies just boiled or steamed. Brussel sprouts, broccoli, asparagus, beets…
But for the OP, I offer - RHUBARB! I get a kick out of people telling me how much they LOVE rhubarb - so long as you add enough sugar, spices, fruit, etc. Hell - why not just cook THOSE ingredients up and lose the damned rhubarb?!
You need the rhubarb so you can pretend it’s healthy.
Yep, calamari has to be cooked either super quick, before it rubberizes, or long enough to tenderize. One of the best dishes I ever made was stuffed calamari tubes (stuffing = bread crumbs, herbs, parsley, garlic, chopped raisins, grated parmesan? It was a long time ago) slow roasted in a moderately spicy tomato sauce. It was a lot of work, but scrumptious.