Wendy's Spicy Chicken Nuggets and Ancho Chile Dressing - a two-fer

From a marketing standpoint, adding one more dimension to a fast food staple is brilliant.  You just drop a little spice into your chicken nugget paste and away you go.  Doesn't cost much and you have a whole new product.  I like the idea and, when I saw the commercial, I new I had to try Wendy's new Spicy Chicken Nuggets.

First, even though they are only 99 cents, you don't get a ton of nuggets.  You can see from the picture, that spiciness is visible in the form of a slight red tinge and black pepper specks (it would be interesting to know whether any food manufacturer has ever just used ash to look like pepper instead of using real pepper).  

No matter, there are some real spices in there.  I actually ordered two serving the first time, and just one for the "shoot".  If you keep in mind where the bar is for quality as it relates to chicken nuggets, the Wendy's spicy nuggets are top shelf.  Decent texture, tastes slightly natural (real food flavor!) and has a comforting amount of spice, still didn't make me sweat, though.

But wait, there's more!  As I have previously mentioned, I am on a "less of me is more" campaign" so I ordered a side salad (with super slimming ranch dressing!) with my spicy nuggets.  To my surprise, Wendy's has a spicy ancho chipotle ranch dressing.

A quick search on google confirms my suspicions - ancho and chipotle are two separate peppers!  I bring this up, because I am suspicious that there really is enough ancho in there to make it worth calling it ancho dressing.  My other concern is that by putting to peppers in a viscous taste swallowing morass that is a fast food ranch dressing, is putting lipstick on a pig.

As you can see, the dressing is appropriately spicily colored.  How did it taste?  Well, again, if you consider where the bar has been set for fast food dressing, it was pretty good.  I still think it is a waste of chile peppers to put more than one in this dressing.  Nonetheless, I think this shows that Wendy's, perhaps one of the more respectable of the fast food places, doesn't hate you and is trying to give you a good meal.  Thanks, Wendy's.