Thursday, March 22, 2007

Bad MRE's revisited

Menu #24, Meatloaf with Gravy: This was a 2005 MRE rather than a 2004 MRE, so the contents of the pouch were a little different. There was only one tube of grape jelly, and there was a sugar wafer rather than fig newtons. But the verdict remains the same: Friskies cat food. Totally. Same consistency. Same taste. (Oh shut up, we had cats growing up, and I was a curious kid!). Oh, since there's only one heater in the packet, if you don't have a spare heater from another MRE heat up the meatloaf and gravy then pour the hot gravy into the pouch of mashers to heat them up. Otherwise the gravy is really lumpy and lardy and disgusting. Trust me on this.

Menu #14, Vegetable Manicotti. Again this was a 2005 MRE rather than a 2004 MRE. The alarming color of the 2004 entre' with its garish applications of red and green food coloring was reduced, the coloration of the 2005 entre' is almost natural. The taste was still, well, vegetable manicotti. But with crackers it was edible, even though I was out of parmesan cheese powder to put on it. I move this from the "avoid at all costs!" column to the "Eh, bore-ing" column. Unfortunately it appears that we're going to be stuck with this rather blah entre' until 2008, when it gets replaced with vegetable lasagna. Hey, Natick dudes, can you figure out some way to package a little packet of parmesan cheese powder with this thing? Yeah, I know the shelf life requirements are a bitch, but you guys are geniuses, surely you can figure this one out!

Oh, regarding MRE crackers: If I could buy just MRE crackers all by themselves, I'd buy them by the bushel for backpacking. They're lightweight, bullet-proof, filling, and nutritious. I'm not sure how the guys in Natick managed to make crackers that don't turn to crumbles even when dropped a hundred feet from a chopper to the ground, but the result is still visibily and gustatorially crackers, unlike some of their past concoctions (MRE "bread", for example, is good but doesn't really resemble bread very much, nor really taste much like bread... more like a soft wheat cookie, I think).

-- Badtux the Gustatory Penguin

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1 comment:

  1. Scorpio22/3/07 4:30 PM

    Shelf life? Of dry, aged cheese? Dud, the stuff is created by mold and is not going to rot. Pizza Hut should donate cheese packets to the troops!

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