Chocolate Muesli / Pasta Porchini / Chicken & Potato Stew
Part 3 - Breakfast
Here's what I chose to make up the dinner:
- Breakfast Items
- Chocolate muesli with milk, dehydrated
- Energy bar
- Chocolate
- Bread Substitute
- Jam
- Vitamin Enriched Bonbons
- Vitamin-mineral drink
- Coffee, Instant
- Coffee whitener
- Sugar
- Breakfast Items - Prepared
That's it! How much water? Should it stand? I filled it by sight until it seemed too watery and thin. Because it was a cold water item, I just poured it straight into the bowl as-is, and stirred a couple times over the next few minutes while it thickened. To my amazement, it worked out perfectly.Mix contents of the pouch with hot or cold water according to taste.
The chocolate bar was a mystery. In the sealed ration, it was broken and reformed and the outer wrapper was torn a bit. While using the bar in photos, I had made sure that it was kept together. When it came time to plate the meal, I found out that (as you might be able to see in the photo above) the two pieces of the bar were apparently not from the same original. Perhaps a few broke up in the packing plant and the closest bits were put together to make sure they weren't wasted. The chocolate itself was great! Dark chocolate is my favorite, and it's been a while since I've had a whole bar.
The energy bar you might remember from part 2. This is another fruit and fruit-juice bar, really a pleasure to get compared to a heavier energy bar.
The coffee was smooth and fairly light (which means more caffeine than a dark roast). I opted to add one packet of sugar (with neat little scenes on them) and the entire packet of whitener. The vitamin mineral drink, like I mentioned in part 1 tastes very similar to Lemon Lime Gatorade.
This was my first review using a melmac bowl, a melmac mug, and a clear plastic tumbler - all US Government Issued cafeteria thoroughfare. The tray I've been using was a trade item from steve1989 a while back. It finally dawned on me today when I was washing up after the meal why I think I've been drawn to use this particular set.
I worked for a few summers as a camp counselor at Goose Pond in Northeast Pennsylvania. One summer, the three people that had been working in the kitchen doing the washing after each meal service walked out. I can't recall the exact reasons so I'll refrain from guessing why that was exactly. I was working as a counselor in training that year, so we would move between the different departments week by week, getting a feel for where we might want to apply when we came back as full counselors. The camp director asked all of the trainees if any of us could fill in and save the camp
while they tried to hire replacement staff for the positions. I was the only person that volunteered, and so I washed dishes for 250 people, three times a day, for seven days. The job was supposed to include 100% of the pots/pans/stovetops/ovens/etc as well, but because I was the only person to volunteer to replace three people that had walked out the cook and prep cook stepped up and helped me with that job for the week.The director was true to his word and found three new staff members to come in and take over for the rest of the summer so I got to go back to trying different areas of the camp to work in. Surprise surprise, when I came back the following years, I was the camp Quartermaster. The trays, bowls, mugs, and tumblers that my camp used - the place settings for hundreds that me and a Hobart dishwasher laid waste to for 16 hours a day that week, were the exact set I'm now using for ration reviews. My camp used all sorts of military surplus equipment, so it makes sense that I'd been drawn back to this set all these years later.
It was a great experience getting to eat this Slovenian Type B ration. The best by date on this was September 2014, so we know they're entirely fresh at least a year and a half from that point if kept cool and dry. As always, thank you all for reading - I hope you enjoyed the review!
