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 - ***