Menu 23: Chicken Pesto Pasta

Flavorful. Italian. Salty. The Chicken Pesto Pasta is one of seven Italian-inspired dishes on the MRE menu, and is perhaps the most adventurous for the staid palate.

Pesto arrived in Northern Italian cooking in the middle of the 19th century by way of India, where pesto’s defining viridescent ingredient, basil, originates. As a sauce for pasta dishes, pesto is made from macerating garlic, basil, and pine nuts and emulsifying it with olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and fiore sardo (cheese made from sheep’s milk). The MRE recipe stays true to these ingredients and adds quite a few unpronounceable ones of its own.

Note on usage: The term “pesto” arises from the Italian word for “pestle”, the device traditionally used to mash up the ingredients. Many other pasta sauces prepared in a similar way (with varying taste and colors) also use the term.

Italian Bread Sticks – Eat

The worldly and well-traveled cousin of the snack bread family, the Italian Bread Sticks have a powerful herbal taste of garlic and onions, cut, ever so masterfully, by the sweetness of powdered buttermilk.  The dough is plentiful with unidentified particles.  Turning to the ingredients, I find two candidates: wheat bran and “spice.” Which spices? Anise? Rosemary? Wood? Who knows?

Unlike the more ambiguous and versatile white, wheat, and even multigrain snack breads found in MREs, this bread is proudly an entrée carb and plays well with both cheese spread and marinara sauce.

Chicken Pesto Pasta: Chicken Breast with Rib Meat Strips and Pasta in a Basil Pesto Sauce. – Eat if hungry

The Chicken Pesto is likely the most flavorful of the MRE entrees.  Its garlic and herbs will stay with the eater long after the meal is completed, and especially of he decides to go jogging.

My first bite into the chicken, I am overwhelmed by the salt – 1040 mg in all.  The pieces are firm, overcooked, and surprising large given that they supposedly came from between the ribs of a chicken. Each iron morsel is packed with unnecessary seasoning, as if the poor bird was executed by a lethal injection of onion and garlic powder.  This is rather unfortunate since the meat overpowers the enjoyable delicacy of the egg noodles and the subtleness of the basil, pine nuts, and sun-dried tomatoes in the sauce.  The non-chicken elements are proportional and delightful, though pungent on the breath.

Patriotic Cookies – Something special

AKA Animal Crackers, but instead of dangerous and exotic animals like lions, tigers, and bears (oh, my!), they are formed into the shapes of Eagles, flags, “USA”, the head and torch of the Statue of Liberty, and even Uncle Sam. In the wrong hands, equally lethal symbols.  These cookie have a great crunch, the perfect sweetness, and a balanced, enjoyable flavor.  Snack on these and you may have flashbacks to your childhood when you weren’t crammed 90 deep in an open-bay Guatemalan barracks.

Apple Turnover – Eat if hungry

AKA “the Thanksgiving Dessert Hot Pocket.” The turnover is cinnamon apple pie filling packed inside a flesh-like pouch.  The outer edge has a odd flavor of preservatives, like the sterilized, metallic, yet slightly micro-bacterial smell of air jets blowing in a passenger air plane.

Carbohydrate Electrolyte Beverage Powder, Grape - Don't drink.

AKA Grape Drank.  Don't drink your calories, especially when it is all refined sugar.

Tasters Choice – Don’t drink

One small step for instant coffee.  One giant leap from the real thing.

Cinnamon Gum - Chew

Spicy with out the heat of an Atomic FireBall candy, it is the pleasing culmination of this meal.  The makers knew to kill the pesto flavor with fire rather than attempt to drown it in mint.  The taste lasts about 90 seconds.

Chicken Pesto Pasta

Taste - ****

Rarity - ***

Presentation - ****

Bonus Item - ***

Menu 19: Beef Patty, Jalapeno Pepper Jack

Familiar. Comfort. Food? The beef patty is the MRE as unfortunately American as obesity, Walmart, and Reaganomics. While hamburgers in general are the easiest thing to prepare for fussy eaters, the beef patty is one of the most difficult MREs to eat or, for that matter, enjoy. 

Like many good ideas of the last century, the idea for a hamburger spread by way of the World's Fair. Invented in Connecticut based on the culinary traditions of the German region of the same name, the Hamburger can be essentialized as a ground meat patty sandwiched between two slices of bread. Often a bun. Its debut was quickly followed by a wave of anti-German sentiment in the United States before the First World War, leading to such name changes as "Salisbury Steak" (which today denotes a burger minus the bun) and "sliders" (which are thinner and often punctured with holes to allow complete cooking via grilling on only one side).

Revenge is a dish best served cold.  The Hamburger is a dish best served hot.  From its invention, in fact, the hamburger has been a fast-food hot sandwich served out of food carts and lunch stands.  It was designed, perhaps destined, for its current role as the #1 fast food entree item.

I pull out the water-activated heating pack (fun fact: they are only allowed on airplanes if the entire MRE bag remains sealed). I tear off the top tap, remove the silver burger satchel from the cardboard, and slide it inside the bag.  I carefully line up the heating pack to maximize the effectiveness of the generated heat. Squirting just right amount of water inside, I roll up the bag top and prop it at an angle to begin the (luke) warming process.  

I immediately detect an industrial odor escaping from the bag, filling the room.  The Marines tell me this is hydrogen, a highly explosive gas and one which I am quite confident is actually odorless. The intel guys tell me that with the right container, I can use the heating packet to build a bomb.

Normally I don't go though the trouble of heating up my entrees.  I even sometimes forgo the spoon in favor of sucking the meal straight out of the bag.  But today is the Beef Patty's day in court and I want to give it a fair hearing.

Beef Patty, Grilled; Jalapeño Pepper Jack Flavor, Caramel Color Added - Don't Eat.

If I had to sum up the taste of the Beef Patty in a single word, it would be an unexpected one: "crisp". The patty is absolutely desiccated and deprived of all juice. The bread slices are all powder and offer no relief. The experience is like eating a dry sponge made of meat.  I slather on an exorbitant amount of BBQ Sauce and Cheese Spread, trying to salvage this dining disaster.

The BBQ sauce is a genius inclusion in the MRE packs as it performs every duty of ketchup and then some.  Its versatility on burgers, chicken wraps, or even Mexican dishes makes it the Obama (circa 2008) of condiments -- everything to everyone. However, when chewing on a chalkboard eraser of meat, as I was here, no amount of BBQ Sauce can resuscitate it.  These efforts are in vain.

The beef patty itself already includes in its vast and ecclectic list of seasonings a blend of Monterey Jack, Cheddar, and Blue Cheeses making the cheese spread ineffective and redundant.

Attempting to find out what is going wrong in this entree, I cut a cross section and observe something akin to fruitcake or spanish salami.  Clearly there is a lot going on in this burger, but none of it is good.

Cheese Spread with Bacon - Something Special

The rarest and most coveted of the cheese spreads, the Cheese Spread with Bacon is not merely infused with bacon flavoring, it has microchunks of actual bacon.  The schmear has a rich flavor of brown sugar and smoky pork that dances playfully on the tongue.  It is the familiar cheese spread wearing a delightful disguise.  

Don't waste it on the burger.  Eat it plain or grab some crackers out of the bonus box.

Cherry Blueberry Cobbler - Eat
The cobbler is a simple dessert, both in MREs and home dining. A cobbler is some sort of pie filling mixed with a semi-solid cookie crust (or in this case, a soggy piece of snack bread).  Regardless, it is excellent.  The filling is sweet and savory, with just a ludic bit of tartness.  Furthermore, it has actual bits of fruit in it.  The Cherry Blueberry Cobbler isn't trying to be something great.  But it is.

Just watch out for its high sugar content -- 27 grams.

Oatmeal Cookie - Eat if Hungry

The Oatmeal Cookie has a great crunch and lively texture of rolled oats and malted barley flour. One bite and in rushes delicious flavors of cinnamon and allspice: its only two seasonings.   At 280 Calories, however, the Oatmeal Cookie is a bit of an extravagance.

Beef Patty, Jalapeno Pepper Jack

Taste - *

Rarity - ***

Presentation - *

Bonus Items - ****

Menu 18: Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce

Crunchy. Doughy. Squishy. The Beef Ravioli satisfies the whole tactile spectrum.  With corn nuts, ravioli and bug juice, it is every 8-year-old’s dream MRE.  

The favorite son of Italian home cooking, brother of the tortellini, and distant cousin of the Jewish kreplach, Japanese gyoza, Chinese shumai, Polish pierogi, and Thai samosa, the ravioli is a stuffing of meat or cheese wrapped and sealed in egg pasta dough.

Toasted Corn Nugget – Eat

With a truly excellent crunch, perhaps the best offered by any item in any MRE, the toasted corn nuggets are this meal's shining gem.  Corn nuts are made by soaking dry corn in water for several days before deep-frying until brittle. These particular morsels are masterfully buttered, salted, and roasted, as if scraped from the bottom of the popcorn bin at your favorite local cinema.  The golden warmth of the toasting will leave you in disbelief that they are, in fact, served at room temperature.

Coffee, Instant Type III, Freeze dried – Don't drink.

You’d think that after previous failures with instant coffee Types I and II, they would have learned something about making coffee. Strike three! You’re out.

Fittingly, the freeze-drying process used to manufacture instant coffee is the result of American military research.  The coffee beans are roasted, ground, percolated, dehydrated, then apparently discarded and replaced in the packaging with dirt.   Instant coffee comprises over 75% of the coffee drank in homes of the British, a people known for their bland and uninspired food.

Dissolving the hamster-dropping-shaped kernals in hot water, I sipped a insipid liquid vaguely resembling diluted hot coco.  There really isn’t much else to it.

Creamer, Non-dairy, Powdered

Gives the drink the same flavor but in expanded globules.  Nothing more than white paint powder to bring the drink to its familiar color.

Splenda Packet

The ultimate reveal.  Splenda proves that anything can be palatable if only sweet enough. The result was a poor man’s version of the instant cappuccino powder; a sweet dessert drink incepting the vague memory of coffee cake.

Fun fact: despite its motto as the “no calorie sweetener” each 1 gram packet has, in fact, 3.36 calories.

Beef Ravioli – Eat if hungry

The heartiness of the tomato sauce somehow overpowers any flavor of beef fat present in the dish in considerable quantity.  Each ravioli is perfectly sized for the MRE pouch: not so big to require cutlery beyond the brown plastic spoon, but not so small that’s it is incapable of carrying sauce The doughy texture of the ravioli shells is quite pleasing in a jejune sort of way.  Think Chef Boyardee.

Wheat Snack Bread – Eat if hungry

Dusted in flour as if just rolled and baked, the wheat bread has a sweet flavor that is dry to the mouth. Its swirls of perforated dough enable easy separation into bread sticks and are a good vehicle for scooping the otherwise uninspired sauce of the ravioli.

Beverage Base Powder Tropical Punch - Don't drink

The prototypical “bug juice”.  The “Tropical” flavor is almost exclusively pineapple and cannot hold a candle to the Hawaiian Punch most commonly paired by discerning diners with canned ravioli entrees.  The flavor is sweet at the moment of first taste but dissipates immediately afterward. The powder is mostly food coloring, specifically Red 40: an azo dye manufactured from coal tar and banned completely in many European countries.

Raisins - Don't  Eat
These aren’t the Sun Maid raisins from your childhood.  Oh, no.  For one, these bad boys never stick together. Each is highly lubricated in glycerol and captex oil.  While the grease may ease their passage into the stomach and reduce the hazard for choking, it dampens the authenticity of the grape, giving it a preservative-like taste that varies piece by piece.  Mysteriously too, the skin on the raisins is quite loose as if each raisin lost a lot of weight dehydrating in the packaging.

Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce

Taste - **

Rarity - ***

Presentation - ***

Bonus items - **

Menu 14: Ratatouille (Mixed Vegetables and Penne)

AKA Garbage Pasta

Vegetarian. Textured. Loamy. Popularized in the American consciousness by the 2007 Disney/Pixar movie of the same name, Ratatouille or more properly ratatouille niçoise is a stewed vegetable entrée consisting of eggplant, zucchini, and bell peppers sautéed with onions and garlic in a tomato sauce. Of all the MRE entrees, it is perhaps the least understood, oft rejected (prematurely, I would argue) because it is the “V” word.  Vegetarian.

Ratatouille (Mixed Vegetables and Penne) - Eat

The olio has a rich, varied texture.  At 180 calories, it’s a hearty stew that is also good for you.  The robustness of the sauce, loaminess of the eggplant, and zestiness of the basil, bay leaf, and thyme give the dish a rare and distinctive savor. If that image doesn’t make your pulse quicken, the ratatouille’s 1120mg of sodium (47% of daily intake) surely will.

The unexpected presence of slow-carb penne may throw off the discerning ratatouille diners, but the scotta noodles do help round out the dish and make it a complete entrée.

Crackers - Don't Eat

Seemingly inspired by matzah bread, the crackers have the crunch and togetherness of a stale saltine, minus the essential salt. (After the Ratatouille, any more would be a health hazard). Its desiccation presents both an imperative for water and offers neutral stage on which both the Ratatouille and peanut butter could execute beautiful performances.  L’chaim!

Peanut Butter - Eat if hungry

Lightly salty and overly sweet, the peanut butter has a surfeit of fats that crowd out the tongue and obscure any flavor of peanuts. Trying to be all things to all people, the peanut butter lacks the piquant qualities that would otherwise make it delightful on the cracker.  Instead, it is the confectionary version of ketchup, suffocating out flavor. At 250 calories, it is simply not worth it.

Strawberry Dairy Shake Powder - Eat if hungry

A delicate and authentic strawberry taste that is less Nesquik and more melted Neapolitan ice cream. It leaves a harsh droughty feel on the back of the throat, likely a result of the refined sugar or perhaps added calcium and vitamin D.  It pulls off the difficult feat of tasting authentically dairy, not an easy accomplishment.  Don’t drink your calories.

Raisins - Never Eat

These aren’t the Sun Maid raisins from your childhood.  Oh, no.  For one, these bad boys never stick together. Each is highly lubricated in glycerol and captex oil.  While the grease may ease the raisins’ passage down your gullet, it dampens the authenticity of the grape, giving it a preservative-like taste that varies piece by piece.  Mysteriously too, the skin on the raisins is quite loose as if each raisin lost a lot of weight while waiting in the packaging.

Marble Pound Cake - Something Special

The undisputed king of desserts.  It has the light airiness of angel food cake and a crisp crust that must come from baking in individual tins.  The pound cake is only lightly sweet and would be a good compliment to black coffee.  As a stand-along dessert, the sophisticated host would serve it with whipped buttercream or (for the adventurous) cardamom frosting.  The included peanut butter is also passable.

Though apparently swirled with vanilla and chocolate batters, I could not detect any differences in flavor across swirl distributions.  This may be purely cosmetic.

Ratatouille

Taste - ***

Rarity - *

Presentation - ****
Bonus Items - ***

Menu 24: Southwest Beef and Black Beans

AKA: the South-of-the-Boarder Diaper Disaster

Elusive.  Mysterious. Desired.  The Southwest Beef and Black Beans MRE was the last one I was able to find on my quest to eat them all.

Kippered Beef - Eat

I decide to start with the Kippered Beef.  The Kippered beef Shares the rare distinction with the “Toaster Pastry, Brown Sugar” as being the only item so governed by the imperative for freshness that it is wrapped twice in packaging. A wrapper inception.

I am unsure what kippering does to beef, but am pleased with the result.  My teeth sink into the meat with a satisfying ease, slicing through the sinewy flesh like a shovel in clay soil.  In contrast to unkippered jerky products, the muscle fibers disintegrate quickly in my mouth yielding a texture closer to that of a Slim Jim.

Its taste is rich in a pleasant umami rather uncommon in MRE products. Its saltiness washes over the tongue in an excellent compliment finishing with just a waft of spiciness from cracked black pepper.

At 80 calories, it is a must-eat.

Cheese Spread with Japalenos - Eat if hungry

Betraying my instincts not to eat it so early in the meal, I turn to the rich lipids of the jalapeño cheese spread, second only among the cheese spreads to the bacon cheese spread in taste and rarity.

I head the packaging’s warning to kneed before eating, wondering which of the ingredients’ instability requires the brief massage.  Is it the pyridoxine hydroclorate? Or perhaps the thianine hydroclorate?  There are indeed many possibilities.

The fats hit my tongue in a soothing balm, kicked almost immediately by the heat of the infused jalapeños. The fire begins on the periphery of the tongue and immediately encircles the top of the esophagus. I hope it does not forebode similar unpleasant heat around a different orifice in a few hours.

 

Southwest Beans and Beef - Eat

Though it is vague in naming the inspirational geographic origin of the dish, the presence of corn and beans make it unmistakable: Santa Fe.  Peering into the packaging, I’m astonished by what appears to be the grill marks kissed every so slightly on the delicately sliced beef inside.  I decide it must be my imagination.

The beans, corn, and macerated red peppers were likely intended to add some variety in texture to the medley.  Unfortunately for the Sopako Company of Mullins, South Carolina, each dissolves almost immediately under the teeth, giving it the unexpected and disconcerting mouthfeel of soup.

Flour Tortilla - Eat

Remembering the tortillas, I assemble a burrito with the beef and cheese spread.  The sugary sweetness of the tortilla smothers the taste of the cheese, again proving that 1 +1 is not always 2.  While the tortilla exoskeleton adds some much-needed firmness to the entree, it cannot make up for the absence of the customary shredded iceberg lettuce and chunky salsa and suffers by comparison.

Mocha Cappuccino Instant Powder - Eat if hungry

I tear off the top of the Mocha Cappuccino, squirt in the requisite amount of water, seal up the Ziploc, and shake.  The satisfying velvet quality of the chocolate is punctuated by rogue granules of sugar making for a more interesting eat.  The topping of foam elevates the experience and helps it live up to its “cappuccino” name.  It’s a small luxury.

Apples in Spiced Sauce - Eat

The lone delegate from the fruits block of the food pyramid begins the first act of my two-act dessert. It does not disappoint.  The apples are cut in long sumptuous slices that, while not crisp, have an impressive firmness given the time it has spent wallowing in syrup since its manufacture date.  They evoke grandma’s kitchen – a pie with everything but the gram cracker crust.  But they also live up to the “spiced sauce” name offering at times a challenging dose of cinnamon and nutmeg that will keep the diner guessing.  Grandma has a wild streak.

As I switch to the next food item, the apples’ aftertaste becomes more prominent, eventually taking on an uncanny resemblance to Dial brand hand soap.

Chocolate Banana Muffin Top - Never eat

The Sopak company deserves credit both for recognizing that the muffin top is the only part of the muffin worth eating and for elevating, via clever marketing, a blob of dough in a plastic envelops to the status of “muffin”.

The muffin top has the texture of a warm towel with an infused banana flavor that comes across as fake as a toupee with a chinstrap.  As I reach into the pouch to chivy off pieces, the muffin disintegrate into a fine powder as if I were rough handling a sandcastles.  Eventually, I probably could have added water to make a choco-banana cappuccino, but I decide against it.

Southwest Beef and Black Beans

Taste - ****

Rarity - *****

Presentation - *****

Bonus items - ****