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Here's the review of the first MRE from that case:
MRE No. 20 - Spaghetti w/ Meat Sauce
I consider the Spaghetti MRE to be the prime example of what an MRE is. The mix of components have changed over the years but whenever anyone would ask me about MREs, I'd use the Spaghetti MRE as an example.
The 2008 version of this MRE has a couple of new components so that made the choice of which MRE to try first an easy one. Here are the official contents:
Menu 20
Spaghetti w/Meat Sauce
Baked Snack Cracker, Hot & Spicy
Cheese Spread
Chipolte Snack Bread
Cherry Blueberry Cobbler
CHO Electrolyte Beverage
Hot Sauce, Green
Accessory Packet A
Spoon
Flameless Heater
Hot Beverage Bag
The only difference between the official menu and my MRE is that mine contained "Beverage Base Lemonade, Sugar Free" instead of the "Carbohydrate Electrolyte Beverage".
Here is the MRE, the contents of the MRE removed from the bag, and the contents all spread out.
Here are the "Hot & Spicy Baked Snack Crackers", which are exactly like the "Cheez-it Hot & Spicy" crackers you can get in the grocery store. I would say they just had a hint of tobasco sauce, but not really enough to make them truly "hot & spicy".
Here's the Chipolte Snack Bread. Imagine "Wheat Snack Bread" with a bunch of jalapenos thrown into the batter. This bread has the same look and texture of the regular snack bread but it has a definite spicy jalapeno kick to it. After my first bite, I thought "that's pretty good"...but then the spicyness really kicked in! Check out the second picture - for some reason, this package had two sets of datecodes printed on it and one hand-written number "3".
The first picture below is the Chipolte Snack Bread with some of the plain cheese spread on it (the cheese spread is all melty because I heated it up in the FRH while the main entree was cooking). After I put the cheese on, I had an idea...what if I put some of the hot & spicy snack crackers on it, too? That's the second picture. But then it occurred to me...this would be even better if I poured some of the green Tobasco sauce on the whole mess. And that's the third picture. I must say...this was incredibly delicious!
Up next was the main entree, Spaghetti w/ Meat Sauce. This MRE hasn't changed too much over the years. If anything, it's only gotten better with bigger chunks of meat and maybe a little less salt. This latest MRE version tasted as good as any freshly opened can of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti.
Following the MRE rule of "Everything tastes better with Cheese Spread on it", I added some cheese spread to the spaghetti (second pic). But the remaining Hot & Spicy Snack Crackers were still staring at me and it seemed like a good idea to dump in the rest of the crackers and the rest of the green Tobasco sauce. I mixed it all up and you can see the results in the second picture below. Man, was this tasty! What a great mix!
After the main course came the dessert. I don't personally like cherry-anything so the Cherry Blueberry Cobbler was only "ok" in my opinion. I think it would be a lot better without the cherry part. But Mrs. Kman polished off the whole dessert and she thought it was great.
I was happy to find the sugar-free lemondade in my MRE and gave it a try. It makes a whopping 20oz. of drink, which seems to be an increase over the older Beverage Base Powders. The lemonade tasted great. Also pictured below is the spoon and tobasco sauce.
Finally, here's the accessory pack with its coffee, creamer, sugar, salt, chewing gum, toilet paper, matches, and moist towelette. I even opened up the toilet paper pack to give you a peek inside. It might not look like it from the picture below but there are actually 20 super-thin squares of toilet paper in there.
In case you're curious, the moist towelette was, indeed, very moist. The package even had an URL on the back - http://www.towelettes.com .
!