Beef Stew and Pumpkin Poundcake -'06-'07-'08[??]

[rattattoo]

Threw a yard sale for about eight hours yesterday, and tried to get rid of those four extra cases of MREs. Didn't have a single person even look at them, but I opened up a loose beef stew for lunch and heated it on top of the car.

I didn't pay attention to the packaging because I was actually posting these photos to a different Internet blog. However, it was probably from a menu #9 and my loose-stuff-stash is mostly from the years '06-'07-'08.
I don't believe I have actually had one of the more recent beef stews, and I was a bit surprised to find that the potatoes were "hash browns" size... much smaller pieces than I remember them being from the Wornick meals dating from the turn of the century. I was getting hungry, and I ended up hustling it off of the car hood a little too fast. It hadn't gotten much past warm so it was a little lumpy... but good anyway. Same old canned "Dinty Moore" flavor that I remember.

The day's big winner was the Pumpkin Poundcake. After heating it up on the car, it was absolutely fantastic... moist and flavorful, fall-apart soft with the definite taste of pumpkin spice. However that taste is entirely artificial. Nowhere on the ingredients listing is the word pumpkin actually used.
I really enjoyed it and shook the crumbs out of the very last corner to get it all. The taste was good enough that I was actually sorry that I hadn't saved it to have with a big scoop a French vanilla ice cream.

If I end up cherry picking through the four cases that's the SIL gave me, I will certainly be putting a grab on the #9 beef stews.

[Norton]

The Pumpkin pound cake looks like it would be good with mixed with pears or the fruit cocktail.
To bad about the potatoes being hash brown sized. I like large pieces of potatoes and carrots in the Dinty Moore type stew. Hash brown sized potatoes would end up like mush.

[Bypah]

Too bad I don't live close to you. I would had buy the whole lot!
Nice review!

[rattattoo]

Norton-- so far I have not had any of the poundcakes that were not pretty great.

The only criticism I could probably come up with is that they're so moist and tender that you can't get them out of the package intact so you could stick them on a fork and toast 'em over the fire...