Well to start with nothing was missing, so were off to a good start!
A few notes: Drink for this one was the sugar free lemonade (its in the accessory pack) its the tube type that's easy to pour into a bottled water. Its fine, has that fake sugar, Crystal Light type taste. Also this meal came with Ketchup and Mustard. These were larger packets (than the fast food type) and considered part of the meal, they are packaged in the MRE and not in the accessory pack. Kudos to the military for using Heinz and not some generic brand (im a ketchup lover!)
The wheat snack bread (twin pack) I believe the idea here is they give you two pieces in the event that you want to make a sandwich out of your beef patty. I put the cheese spread on one, and left the other plain to eat along side the beef.
The cookie was chocolate chunk. It was great! Semi-soft, very crumbly. It took me a while to place the taste and then my wife took a bite and nailed it when she said "tastes like Chips Ahoy!"
Cocoa beverage powder was good also, tastes just like chocolate milk, the only problem is, as others have noted it makes very little. About 5-6 oz strong and 7-8 weak.
Now for me the side dish in this MRE was the star of the show. The cherry blueberry cobbler was really amazing to me. It had whole (but smashed) cherries in a sweet blueberry puree and lumps of pie dough thrown in. It was sweet and lumpy, it tasted good and not generic at ALL! Now some of you might be wondering, as I was, why is this a side and not a dessert? Read on to the main entrée and ill tell you my opinion on it.
The main dish was the Jalapeno pepper jack beef patty. Just so you know im not a fan of spicy food. The patty itself was dense and compact, it had the consistency of day old meatloaf. If you were going to make a sandwich out of this patty, you'd be all set. The meat is perfect consistency for it. As for the heat factor? Its up there! Granted my tolerance for spicy foods is low, but this thing did pack some heat. The meat itself was fine, tasted like a hamburger or meatloaf. The problem was it was masked by an overwhelming heat so I really couldn't enjoy it. So back to why they chose a cobbler as the side dish. My guess is the sweetness of the cobbler was just perfect to offset the heat and spice of the patty. I ate them side by side and it was delicious! I know it sounds odd eating cobbler with meat, but trust me on this one.
It was also way better with ketchup! (my wife preffered it with mustard....yuck!)
All in all, id say this was a fair MRE, not my favorite by any means but I did love the cobbler. Next time ill use more ketchup and maybe make a sandwich out of it. In hindsight the bland starchy wheat snack bread would help balance out the heat of the patty.
