Hello! Craig here, this is going to be my first review ever!
I decided to dig into my collection of various cases of MRES I've been collecting and meaning to review and I think it's finally time that I start cracking these open more frequently along with writing detailed reviews of each meal.
So tonight I went with personally one of my most anticipated meals, only because it wasn't known as a very favorite meal amongst its service and that it's been discontinued for some time now. So let's do this! Menu number 4 Country Captain Chicken
Case is from early 2004 seeing that some of the items enclosed in the meals range from the end of 2003 until the beginning of 2004
Here's the entire contents layed out. Honestly, looks like a pretty solid meal, especially those peanut butter M&Ms!
- Meal
It seemed as though the FRH was inoperative, as expected and was most likely due to poor storage of the meals for all of these years. So I opted for letting the entrée and side sit under some hot water for a couple of minutes and in the mean time I decided to start with the cheese... And let me be the first to say that was a NO GO, the cheese was brown and it had a nice, shiny plastic look to it! Yum!! But as usual still retained that wonderful processed government cheesy smell... Mmmmmmmm...
- Cheese Spread
Here it is! All plated up in it's scrumptious glory... The smells weren't horribly repulsive but then again they weren't what one would say... Gourmet...
- Full meal plated
First up is the crackers... They were intact, two solid cracker. They smelled normal with a slight whiff of cardboard... One noticeable thing is the shiny, waxy greasy coating on the crackers. I've seen this before, it's kind of odd. But overall they tasted fairly bland and were up to my little expectations.
- Crackers
Next I'll try the entrée, the chicken itself. The first thing that struck me is the slightly off putting smell of spice or something. You could tell that they tried to go in a very specific route of flavor with this one. It had a brown sauce and a couple of small bits that I couldn't identify along with tomato and a "breading" that would just scrape off of the cutlet.
- Chicken close up
This was probably the weirdest part of the chicken... It had turned into this dark brown color as seen in the picture, you could tell it was separated and reformed, obviously... Judging by the consistent texture and color. But still weird! And now for the taste test... Ew! This was an immediate spit out, absolutely disgusting. It tasted just as it smelled, horribly seasoned with a hint of plywood. The cutlet held up all of these years but was definitely a NO GO on it's initial maiden voyage into my mouth and back onto my plate!!
- The Bite!
Now onto the side dish, noodles in butter flavored sauce. This was pretty straight forward. It had a slight buttery smell but it was also hindered by yet another cardboard/plywoody smell... AWESOME! So I went for it. I guess it wasn't that bad but I couldn't follow through with getting it down. It tasted very bland with a buttery note. It was actually similar to how it smelled. Overall... Not very good. At all. So it gets the NO GO.
- Noodle close up
Okay! Now time for a little desert! I'll start with the "toaster pastry" I was hoping that it could bring some life back into this meal but... Once again I was let down. It turned out to be cinnamon, and it tasted as such with a wonderfully strong metallic taste! So yeah... I was all set on that. It looked and smelled fine though.
- Toaster pastry
Onto those M&Ms! I was pretty excited for these because I've never even had them before. As you can see in the picture the candy was intact and had very nice color in each piece, but each piece had an odd waxy coating that seemed to melt from the heat of my hand. But that didn't stop me! They tasted fine! Chocolate with a nice overwhelming peanut butter flavor! These were good... You just had to get through the waxy coating.
- M&M close up
And I just hit the 10 picture cap for this post that I just found out about haha. But! I will post additional photos below.
Overall this meal was a definite NO GO, I can see why it was very short lived and wasn't favorited by many.
Even Ace steered clear of this one!
- Ace
Well that's it for my review of Menu number 4 Country Captain Chicken, leave a comment and let me know what you think or if you've also had this meal! I'll be doing more reviews soon seeing the I have case A and B from 2004 and a case from 1993, go ahead and let me know what you guys would like to see next!
Thanks for reading everyone and stay hungry!
