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Opened it today, so far have ate the salmon pate, flavoured with lemon&dill-not bad a bit too "fishy".
Next had the salmon with rice&veg.
Very nice too, used the esbit cooker to heat it, as said before it does burn the food on the bottom of the tin a bit but very fast and does the job.
Salmon&rice was very tasty, in fact better than what you would expect from army rations.
Have tried number 6 so far(chilli con carne&salmon/pasta)and have been impressed with the French rations.
Sorry no pics, was too busy eating, will post when I try the fish soup, Lamb tagine and the melted cheese.
P.S Any French members is that cheese supposed to be eaten cold or hot like fondue?

i have heard they swap 5 US MRE for 1 RCIR in the field.

I've heard that too, but I think that's a figure that got thrown around back in 1992 during the first Iraq war. I read something more recently about this swapping ratio. I don't have any links or direct quotes for you but what they were basically saying is this...

In the field, MREs don't really have any "value" - so it's not like 5 MREs are worth one RCIR. MREs are all over the place and you can have as many as you'd like. So if someone wants 1, 5, 10, or a pallet of MREs for a single RCIR, they don't really care. I'm sure there's a practical limit, but I can imagine the trading conversation goes something like this:

Soldier with RCIR: I'll trade you this RCIR for some MREs. How many will you trade?
Soldier with MREs: How many do you want?

Hi,
that remind when the Germans allready had the EPA with "real" meals and the French army still had the "T" rats with the processed cheese and the corned beef everyday. The ratio was rather in favor of the EPA of course.
Generally the T box were open, the brandy, the cigarettes and sometimes the chewing gum removed then the rest thrown to the dump.

Of course there was ONE guy who used to keep everything and even to collect the others' rations...