Aldi’s new kettle chip flavors are the spicy new find

Aldi is the best grocery store in the world. The Germans really knew what they were doing with this one! Cheap prices, small stores, good products – what’s not to love?

True Aldi fans know what the best part of shopping at Aldi is: the legendary middle aisle. This is where Aldi puts its limited-time specials, which can include but is not limited to new flavors of cereals, real name-brand foods, housewares, clothing, and even pet toys. Aldi shoppers will tell you about the times they walk out of the store with a cat’s scratching post, a new coffee maker, slippers, and none of the milk they went in to buy in the first place.

We found these new flavors of chips in our local Aldi’s middle aisle, and we just couldn’t walk out without them. Hot Chicken Kettle Chips is one thing, but seeing Cuban Sandwich Kettle Chips is too good to ignore. We ended up grabbing both bags, because that’s how it is with Aldi, and we probably ended up forgetting to buy some very important essential thing like paper towels. But that’s fine – now you can share the chips with us. At least, you can read what we thought of them.

KFC finally enlists in the Chicken Sandwich Wars

Finally, finally, the Original Chicken Restaurant has gotten on board with the times. It’s not like KFC hasn’t done plenty of other chicken sandwiches in its time – remember the donut sandwich? That was nuts – but they’re doing THE Sandwich. The Chick-fil-A ripoff. The Popeyes Sandwich. The southern-style sandwich with pickles and mayo and a whole tiny little chicken breast that everybody and their fucking mother is going apeshit for and putting on the menus for their fast food restaurants now.

So what took you, KFC? You won us back, and it took you this long to get The Sandwich on your menu? We’ve been waiting to write this article since, we got it written down here on our article notes, May 26th of 2020, and only just now you’ve gotten this bad boy out nationwide. What’s up with that? You guys are slipping, or something? I remember the old KFC commercials with the toon Colonel who was making fun of the “Burger Boys” for their inferior sandwiches and bragging about KFC sammies. Now who’s the sandwich dorks, huh? You guys let Popeyes beat you to the punch on this one? 

But, come on, it’s KFC. They’ve had enough knocks in their life. They’re the ancient prizefighter with a tremor, rail-thin, insisting they’ve still got one more fight in ‘em. But you know this old dude could still whoop your ass if you pushed him in a corner. Well, KFC seems plenty pushed into a corner to me. Can they keep up with the big dogs now, or do they deserve their space at the bottom?

Cheetos Mac ‘n Cheese is okay.

When does irony stop mattering?

Advertisers understand that irony has been a powerful marketing force for years now. Just look at the state of many products: marketers no longer try to assure us that their products are superior, or quality, or even good. They openly and unabashedly embrace the idea that their goods are bad, strange, and comedic. “Honesty” is valued above anything else – so what if the product is garbage? You know you want it, you slob!

And we – I specifically mean food reviewers, including us here at Eggware.XYZ – fall for it every time. There’s almost nothing we can do to keep ourselves from eating these awful foods, talking about how bad they are, how absolutely awful these things are, what were they thinking? The companies that produce this garbage love it when we do this. There’s no way to actually and accurately communicate something is bad anymore. “No such thing as bad publicity” has been actively weaponized. The more we mock them, the more we insult them, the more we bemoan their terrible practices, the stronger they get.

So it’s with a heavy heart that we have decided to review the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Mac ‘N Cheese today. We know just by acknowledging this product’s existence, we’re letting Frito-Lay score a win over us. We don’t care anymore. To paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, you can’t win, you can’t break even, you can’t even leave the game. The world has to know how awful this stuff is.

Popeyes’ “Twisty” Wicked Shrimp gets it twisted on the wickedness

Popeyes is one of our favorite restaurants for limited time offers. Back in the day, we practically survived off of their amazing $4 monthly deals, all of which were interesting and completely different from what other fast food restaurants were offering.

Nowadays, Popeyes is in a pretty good position and doesn’t do “weirder” LTOs anymore. Most of their monthly offers have been more bargain oriented instead of experimental. We chalk this up to The Sandwich, a menu item that has completely changed how Popeyes does business. They’re a sandwich restaurant now, you know. You don’t need to be convinced to try their food anymore.  You go there to eat a sandwich.

That’s why when we saw their latest monthly offer was a five dollar Surf and Turf Basket, we didn’t think much of it. We were hungry, it was getting late, and some cheap shrimp and chicken sounded fantastic. It seemed like an LTO Popeyes would do nowadays. We had no idea what we were getting into. We had just ordered a basket of… Twisty Wicked Shrimp.

Dunkin’ Donuts’ Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut: a hateful donut

“Ghost pepper” is a phrase that should not be used lightly. When you claim that your foodstuff has ghost pepper in it, we expect some serious fucking heat levels. The ghost pepper is one of the spiciest chile peppers in the world, with a scoville scale that reaches into the millions. It’s tough stuff. 

But ghost pepper has become pretty vogue in the past years. America’s love of spicy food continues to grow, and only show-stoppers like the ghost pepper can stun us anymore. We’ve looked at plenty of ghost pepper foods in the past: the ghost pepper chips from Trader Joe’s, the ghost pepper wings from Popeyes, and the Dare Devil Grillers from Taco Bell. Some of these were surprisingly spicy, and some were major letdowns, but they were all savory. Dunkin’ Donuts is introducing, to our knowledge, the first sweet ghost pepper offering.

Introducing the “Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut”, a doughnut promising serious heat levels just in time for Spooky Scary Halloween. Can the Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut scare us with its heat? Hit the jump and 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.

Do Us A Flavor and stay inside

It’s that time of year again! In case you haven’t been out to get groceries in the past, oh, ten or so years, Lay’s has regularly done more “interesting” flavors as limited-time promotions. It all started with the “Do Us A Flavor” contest in 2012, where you could submit your ideas for chip flavors online and the winners would be made into real chips. This ended up giving us such strange chips as Cappuccino and Wasabi Ginger, which were utterly divine and need to come back. 

Now Lay’s has released a line of five “Flavor Icons”, chips inspired by famous restaurants around America. No contest here, just five bags of good ol’ American sit-down taste: Chile Relleno from Cocina Azul in Albuquerque; Wavy Carnitas Street Taco from El Torito in Los Angeles; Kettle Cooked New York Style Pizza from Grimaldi’s in New York City; Philly Cheesesteak from Geno’s Steaks in Philadelphia; and finally Nashville Hot Chicken from Party Fowl in Nashville.

We only ended up trying the former three flavors, because grocery shopping sucks. We would have loved to try the hot chicken flavor, but you can’t get everything you want, especially in this hell world we live in nowadays.

So hey, let’s crack open these bags and see what kind of weird shit Lay’s is doing this year.

Scott Ja-Mama’s packs big barbecue into a tiny package

We discovered Scott Ja-Mama’s by complete chance. Driving down the road, as we are wont to do, we simply came to the intersection of Diamond Lake and Nicollet and were forced to stop at its red light. While waiting, Paula turned their head and said, “Now that looks like a hole in the wall!” There was the neon sign of Scott Ja-Mama’s, promising hot barbecue with a one-of-a-kind name. We had never before gotten so immediately excited over a restaurant we had seen on the street. It is our fervent belief that the smaller a restaurant is, the better its food is. And we’re talking about floor space, not just the amount of business it does. Scott Ja-Mama’s looked like it could hold barely five people, maybe seven if they were slim.

So, of course, we were instantly enamored and had to order from there soon. And two days later, we had put the order in. We were going to find out what Scott Ja-Mama’s was all about.

But what is Scott Ja-Mama’s all about? What even is it? Hit the jump to find out.

Why did Burger King bring back its spicy nuggets, here and now?

Burger King brought its spicy nuggets back. You didn’t know they had left? You didn’t even know that Burger King even had spicy nuggets? We can’t blame you. Burger King introduced spicy nuggets back in 2017, shortly after Wendy’s discontinued their nuggets, in a naked cash-grab. 

We’re not really in a position where going outside to grab a handful of chicken nuggets is something you can do in a lark anymore. Going out for Burger King is a thing now, like literally any reason you go outside. You gotta bring your mask, and your hand sanitizer, and carefully plan to make sure you don’t get too close to anybody else… it gets exhausting. You need a good reason if you’re going outside. Like, perhaps, Burger King offering those spicy nuggets at an unbelievably cheap price: eight for a dollar? We’ve had these nuggets before, but it had been years since we last tasted one… Well, grab your mask and hit the jump, what is there to lose?