Hello, clowns!

Time to put on your party hats, because today is a big day. It just so happens to be my birthday. I’m 41. Can you believe it? I can’t. As you can tell by my sense of humor, I will be 12 forever.

To celebrate tonight, Davida is getting me what may in fact, be the best birthday present ever…a Costco membership.

Don’t worry, the gang is throwing me a party later too.

In the meantime, as I wait for three stuffed animals to clamber up on that cake and light some candles (which is wildly dangerous for them), I would like to regale you with a tale from just a few nights ago.

On Friday, Davida and I got blitzed on hard seltzer (we go hard, baby!), and just like a lot of people get when they drink, we started becoming pretty hungry. It was around midnight when I had an idea.

“Hey babe?” I asked Davida.

“What?” she replied. I gave her a look.

“Do you want to get McDonald’s?”

Davida broke out into a cheeky grin and nodded. Since it was quickly decided, I grabbed my phone and pulled up the DoorDash app. We don’t order delivery very often since I typically do a lot of cooking, but sloshed at midnight, we were gettin’ real wild.

Currently, McDonald’s is offering a limited-time-only dipping sauce for McNuggets that you can only order online: Szechuan sauce.

This Szechuan sauce is the same substance that caused a fiasco some years ago, when it was featured in the cartoon show Rick and Morty. Long story short, McDonald’s released an extremely tiny amount of it for just one day, Rick and Morty fans showed up in droves, and when they realized they couldn’t get their hands on any, got real mad and practically started an online riot. A sheepish McDonald’s eventually released the sauce widely so all those stinky clowns could finally get their hands on some, and stop fighting each other for it.

Marketing works extremely well on me, because I am feeble-minded, so I decided to get some.

There’s a catch: If you want to order extra Szechuan sauce cups, you’re limited to two.

The thing is, I discovered the DoorDash app lets you tap the sauce quantity button as many times as you’d like.

Which is why I mashed the button 100 times.

The sauce cups are $0.25 each, which meant that 100 of them was $25. Drunk Dannis thought that $25 for 100 portions of Szechuan dipping sauce seemed pretty reasonable. Besides, if I ate 99 of them, I could sell the last one to a Rick and Morty fan for $3,282,3485, recouping the cost of the sauces and allowing me to retire early. So I submitted our order, fully prepared to shit my pants when the DoorDash driver handed me a bulging bag of sauce cups.

About 15 minutes later, I got a message from my delivery driver, whose name was Freddie.

All it said was, “What did you order.”

I responded, “100 SZECHUAN sauces.” I’m not sure why I felt compelled to write the word Szechuan in all caps, but alcohol is a strange mistress.

He did not respond, and then the app suddenly informed me that Freddie was no longer our driver. Perhaps the capital letters seemed threatening to him. Or he was extremely afraid of someone who had the nuts to order 100 cups of Szechuan sauce.

Then I got a phone call from a private number.

It was a DoorDash rep, telling me they had to cancel the sauce. I tried to negotiate with them, but mid-sentence it occurred to me that this person was from an overseas call center and was not interested in haggling with me for a large quantity of limited-time-only dipping sauces.

I considered telling them it was about to be my birthday in a few days, but I ultimately refrained out of the kindness of my heart. Birthday power is not to be abused, you know?

We still ended up getting a few cups, though.

Honestly, Szechuan dipping sauce kind of sucks, to tell you the truth. It tastes like sweet watery soy sauce with a touch of ginger, and nothing at all like Szechuan food. In fact, if a Szechuan chef tried some of this shit I have a feeling they’d be insulted. It’s like offering a Korean person a version of gochujang, which is fermented red pepper sauce, when it’s really just Heinz tomato ketchup.

Maybe this was DoorDash’s secret birthday present to me, by canceling the order. I don’t know what the fuck I would have actually done with 100 cups of Szechuan dipping sauce anyway. I’ve never seen an episode of Rick and Morty, but if this is the sauce they went apeshit over, I’m not sure I trust their sense of taste.

Oh, hey, the gang finally managed to light the candle and they’re about to start singing, so I should probably go join them.

I don’t want to keep my best friends waiting, you know?

I’d tell you guys not to get drunk and order delivery, but honestly, we all know that’s the best way to order food. If you enjoyed this harrowing tale, don’t forget to share it on social media with your friends, loved ones, and enemies.

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You know what a great birthday present would be? If you all signed up for a paid version of the newsletter. (Shameless, I know.)

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You’ll get multiple exclusive extra editions of the newsletter per month, and you’ll be granted full access to the archives at foodisstupid.substack.com. That includes all the previous paid stuff! It supports me, Davida, the cats, the gang, and the newsletter, plus you’ll get the satisfaction of being a patron of the dumbest publication about food that ever existed.

If you’ve gotten this far, I’d like some suggestions on what to do with the two leftover cups of Szechuan sauce we have left. I’ll pick one and whip it up for the paid version of the newsletter this week.

Thank you all for being here with me on my 41st birthday, and don’t forget, I love you all so much. See some of you in your inboxes later this week. I’m excited to see what you come up with.

Food is Stupid

What happens when you try to order 100…