Mini Cheddars are ruining my life

Mini Cheddars. Mini Cheddars. Mini Cheddars. Mini Cheddars.

It means SOMETHING. It has to, right? It’s everywhere. It’s torturing me. My life was good before Mini Cheddars. (My life was actually really bad but I don’t care.) Maybe my life would be better without Mini Cheddars. Maybe it’s the one thing weighing me down, or maybe it was there, plotting even in my earliest days. How can I know I’ve never eaten a Mini Cheddar? “They’re British or something,” I hear you saying, “and you’ve lived in America your entire life.” I don’t care. Someone smuggled a Mini Cheddar on an international flight one day and decided to poison me.

That’s the only explanation.

Tons of people get commercial jingles stuck in their head. I don’t care. This is not that. This is nothing like that. This is way worse. I am being actively conspired against. These three commercials are all connected and I will show you how.

New brew Mountain Dew VooDew Two, woohoo?

We like to drink Mountain Dew, but we’re pretty neutral on the regular Mountain Dew itself. Much more interesting is their large selection of flavors – the classics like Game Fuel, LiveWire, Code Red, and so, so many more. Plain Mountain Dew seems flat in comparison. Sure, sometimes there’s nothing you’d like more than the fresh taste of Green, but then you can just have a crisp Sprite or something. Why settle for less? Give me a glass of White Out and I’ll be happ- oh right, they discontinued White Out, and discontinued so many other limited-time flavors because we can have nothing good in the world for more than a moment.

In that vein, Pepsi has seen it fit to bring back the VooDew, the “mystery flavor” soda that was released last year for the Halloween season. With Fall somehow having come back again, VooDew has come with it as surely as the changing colors of the leaves.

The gimmick of VooDew, as we already defined, is that it is a “mystery flavor” which means it doesn’t taste like much at all. Last year it was revealed to be candy corn, an obviously Halloween flavor that is so flavorless that it probably could have been anything. What flavor could it possibly be this year??? Let’s find out!

McDonald’s finally catches up with Spicy Chicken McNuggets

Finally, the last and greatest of the Big Three falls to the world of spicy nuggets. Spicy Chicken McNuggets are now available nationwide, after so many spiceless years. It’s hard to imagine that McDonald’s has never before offered a spicy variant of their nuggets, even when they’ve done the very popular (and sorely missed) Spicy McChicken.

The Chicken McNugget has been one of the biggest items of the McDonald’s menu for years. When it first was introduced, it caused a massive chicken shortage in McDonald’s supply chain because every single franchisee wanted them! The McRib was invented solely to function as a stop-gap special item until more chicken could be ordered. McDonald’s messing around with the Chicken McNugget is bonkers to consider, and here we are.

Wendy’s has always been the boss of the spicy nugget scene, and even Burger King stepped in to fill the void after Wendy’s briefly discontinued them. In hindsight, the idea of McDonald’s not doing a spicy nugget seems ludicrous. But here we are, the Spicy Chicken McNugget is here, and we’re gonna find out if McDonald’s should have bothered.

Reach dairy enlightenment through the Cheese Riddles

The mysteries of the world are uncountable, unknowable, perplexing beyond human imagination. There’s so much that we cannot know, things we will not, must not know. These grains of forbidden knowledge are cataloged in far, disparate libraries, protected by the wisest of monks who have dedicated their lives to studying this lore. 

But it’s our privilege to introduce you to this secret world, to initiate you into the study of these mysteries. We alone hold the keys of knowledge that, when used, will unlock new dimensions of understanding in your own brain. We invite you, acolyte, to step through the door to your new life. Come and ponder with us… the Cheese Riddles. 

Can KFC’s fries jump the bar that 2020 buried?

When we started writing this article, we were going to be very, very harsh on KFC. We were fans of the potato wedges, and upon hearing that they were replacing them with fries, we grew very upset. How could they do this? Potato wedges were one of the cornerstones of the KFC menu. Fries are… Nothing. Generic. Bland. They are everywhere, and potato wedges were a delightful way to separate KFC from the rest of the fast food world.

KFC’s appeal wasn’t that it was just “fast food”. It felt like a meal, a real meal that you eat with your family as a thing. KFC has offered quick service meals for our entire lives, but having the platonic idea of “getting a bucket for dinner” is inseparable from KFC as a concept. The wedges illustrated this. They weren’t french fries like what you’d get at a McDonald’s, they were home-cooked wedges just like what you could cook at home. Total difference.

We felt that KFC getting rid of the wedges was the latest awful move in a series of terrible decisions. KFC has been on a sharp and steep decline since the mid-2000s, and nothing seems to be turning their image around. They rely on tacky gimmicks like the new Colonel commercials and outlandish promotional stunts like VR video games and Crocs that smell like fried chicken, but can’t get past the simple fact that their food is not as good as it used to be and their atmosphere is a dump.

We haven’t properly eaten at KFC in what may be years. Them switching to fries seemed like justification that it was the right decision.

But then we decided we had to give it a chance.

Taco Bell is making us live in Taco Hell

Taco Bell is back at it again spitting in the face of their customers by butchering their menu. After the travesty that was their recent decimation, they’ve once again taken the scalpel to their menu and removed classics. The damage wreaked this time is nowhere near as severe as last time, but what’s been removed is… We don’t even have the words.

It seems like Taco Bell is only doing this to be spiteful by now. We have no other explanation why they would continue to do this after the universally negative response last time. But fast food restaurants do not normally listen to their customers that well, and when they do, it tends to end in disaster.

Let’s just get this over with. I don’t know how much more heartbreak I can handle.

Five Dollar Pizza is so much more than five dollars of pizza

Pizza is too expensive! We’ll just say it! It costs too much money to buy a pizza! Having to pay so much damn money for a simple bread, sauce, and cheese is exhausting. In the quarantine environment we’ve been living in for the past seven months minimum, pizza has evolved from an “easy meal” to “life-saving necessity” for us. We know that pizza isn’t cheap – the costs of cheese and toppings adds up quickly, and the margins are razor-thin even in the largest markets. 

Still, there’s a saying about bad sex and bad pizza: it’s still pretty good. Sometimes the cheapest pizzas are the best ones, not just for their quality, but for the experiences they provide. Some of our best pizza memories take place in parked cars at Little Caesars, at gas stations, in college cafeterias, getting the Pizza Hut personal pan at Target. Cheap pizza is something that’s worth hunting down and going out of your way for.

When we found a place called Five Dollar Pizza in Minneapolis, we really thought it was too good to be true. Ever since Little Caesars had shut down completely in our area, we had resigned ourselves to pizza costing over twice as much from now on.  We didn’t really mind, because Little Caesars pizza really tastes like it was made with five dollars worth of ingredients, so we willing shelled out for our local Domino’s “$5.99 for Two” deals and made do. Seeing that there was another place, an independent place, that offered pizza at a Little Caesars price seemed impossible. But, one day we were up in the area, and decided we simply had no choice but to drop in. For five dollars, what could we lose?