Friday, March 10, 2006

Menu #14: Vegetable Manicotti

This MRE menu is one of the least-loved ones in the MRE repertoire. Let's start by looking at the entre', freshly decanted onto a plate after heating:

Man, look at that alarming red color! And no, that's not meat spilling out. That's zuchinni. The entre' is edible only if you put powdered parmisan cheese on it (which luckily packs well in the field). If you do that, you can eat it without feeling like you're choking it down. Otherwise it is virtually inedible.

It doesn't get better from there. The "Potato sticks" are basically potato chip crumbs because the white-coat wizards at MRE Central haven't yet figured out how to package potato chips so that they won't get turned to powder by a helicopter drop (I must say they do have the proper grease-and-potatoes taste of cheap potato chips tho!). The "pound cake" requires peanut butter to make it edible. Then there's the bag of peanuts -- peanut butter *AND* peanuts, in the same packet? Nobody can eat that many peanuts at a sitting and feel good!

Not even the accessory pouch manages to avoid being a disaster. The accessory pouch contains a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce... which is utterly incapable of making this disaster edible, what is needed is a small pouch of powdered parmesan cheese.

Definitely trade this off to the hard-core peanut lovers in your neighborhood when the Big One hits and you're parcelling out the booty from your last trip to the disaster aid center where they're handing out MRE's. If you must eat it, eat it -- it won't kill you, and if you can scrounge up some powdered cheese it's even edible -- but this one definitely deserves its general reputation.

- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

4 comments:

  1. Ick. And it's miniscule, too. If I served this to my hubby, I'm sure he'd have a very deserved fit, or go out to eat without me! LOL

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  2. It's not all that miniscule, it's the standard MRE entre' size, that's just a big plate. It's just very, very bland. Zucchini squash just isn't very tasty, sorry!

    -BT

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  3. Note to me.
    Buy extra supply of grated cheese and add to hurricane/bird flu/big blast/ preparedness cupboard.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Having eaten field rations before the MRE's were developed I can testify to the dryness of the pound cake, a bit of P-butter or jelly was good for adding some taste.

    ReplyDelete

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