So here's my first experience of French RCIR, the 'famous' ostrich menu. I found it a couple months ago on French eBay for basically the same price as any other. I planned to work my way through it over the New Year's days but with family meetings and such it got spread a bit longer than that, all the items divided into small meals.
First breakfast!
Coffee, muesli with milk and chocolate and some choc chip biscuits.
Great way to start the Sunday. The chocolate chips in muesli melted in the warm water and created really deep, dark chocolatey milk. It was densely packed with good calories and definitely kept me going till lunch
Biscuits a bit on the hard side, but not break-your-teeth hard. Lightly sweetened and went really nicely with the dark coffee. Not much of a coffee drinker, myself but this one wasn't bad. Not at all.
Later on, I made myself a snack plate (no, I did not clean it off all at once. But I was sorely tempted to ^^).
The nougat bar - sticky and sugary sweet. A perfect pick-me-up.
The energy bars - peach/apricot and coffee flavoured, just as advertised. Bit crumbly and oily but not unpleasant.
The fruit jelly - chewy and sugary, definitely berry flavoured but wouldn't be able to call it the raspberry without a hint.
Dark chocolate - bit bloomed but still good. Nice, dark chocolate, rather dry and crumbly but with extra crunchy bits - some crushed cocoa beans.
Some light supper before the final countdown and fireworks.
Royal Ceylon tea was a quite smooth blend, nothing particularly aromatic or flavourful but just an everyday kind of tea. Nice and gentle.
Chicken pate was closer in consistency to the homemade one, compared to the the ones commercially available here. Soft and moist, with a rather distinct flavour. For me though, it tasted way better on its own than with the biscuits.
Why? Cause of how biscuity and buttery the biscuits are. Even the salty ones are more on the sweetish side with some salt added. The cereal ones are probably the most neutral of them all.
(Later, even the salty ones grew on me but still, I mostly ate them on their own.)
What's the best way to start new year? With a festive food, duh!
So let's have something fancy for breakfast - the ostrich in cranberry sauce. Accompanied by some isotonic drink cause even if you didn't party hard last night, proper hydration is always important.
It was my first time using esbit stove but it went without a hitch. Set it outside to keep the fuel fumes away (the fuel tablets had a slight fishy smell but nothing too foul) and my... did it do its job! The can contents were soon happily bubbling and giving off some delicious smell.
And yummy it was! Couldn't really taste the cranberries (though there were some dried in there) but the tomato sauce was okay, pasta had some proper bite to it (no mushiness at all!). And the ostrich meat was dark with a rich flavour but at the same time it just fell apart in my mouth.
The drink (it's New Year's, I'm allowed to break out my fancy glass!) was not quite as nice. I mean, it was a proper isotonic - with a slight red soda flavour. But it's still isotonic and for some reason I can't really stand electrolytes/salts in my drinks - they make me nauseous. On the other hand, it was definitely more palatable than some medicinal hydration mixes.
Snack time again!
The vanilla flavoured cream dessert - or pudding. Rich and creamy, super smooth. Rather sweet to my palate.
The plum jam had some proper fruitiness to it. No watery sugary mess - a solid plum jam, with that savoury note in the end. Tried some on the cereal biscuit and it was ok.
Added the rest to the pudding... BINGO! At first, possibly too sweet - but the plum jam added some extra layer of flavour that balanced out all that sugar.
Time for the other canned entree coupled with a hot drink.
The tea. Green with mint, not my favourite by a long shot but it went down surprisingly well. Minty enough to refresh after oily meal but not overpowering.
The can - tuna and potato salad, designed to be eaten cold and so I did (later, I heated up the leftovers and they didn't get much better). The ingredients list also sported some red and green bell peppers, onions, tomatoes and zucchini (fr. courgette). Just as the pasta in the ostrich dish - everything was cooked just right (beside zucchini - or maybe it's my own aversion to squishy texture), no mushiness. There were some solid pieces of tuna too, and that finally confirmed for me that I'm not a fan of it.
What we've got left?
There's a hot chocolate drink. A perfect pick-me-up on a cold day. Not very thick, closer to cocoa than chocolate in that. But cocoa content definitely made up for that offering a rich, deep flavour.
And the instant soup - cream of vegetables, coupled with the last pack of biscuits. Now, that was bland. Thick and veggie and warm - so would be great for a smooth warm-up - but really bland. Salt and pepper helped a bit but overall.. blah.
Did I enjoy my first taste of French ration? Yes, I did. Will I be getting another one in the future? Hell yeah! (just not now with tuna ^^) And if I were to make forecasts for the 2018 based on that ration, they'd definitely be a good ones
