Hi! Just got done going through my MRE collection to see if there's anything I'd be interested in trying. I grabbed a few of the MREs from this era and salsa sounded good so I went with this. Of course, given it's age I shouldn't be too surprised if this hasn't held up so I have my hopes up too high. Regardless, let's take a look.
As we can see, the entree is dated 8302 so I was pretty excited to see this was a pre-2000 MRE! And it had Jolly Rancher candies in it. Score! I'll list off the contents in this ration:
-Chicken Breast Strips with Chunky Salsa
-Jolly Rancher Assorted Hard Candies
-Lorna Doone Shortbread Cookies (also another awesome gem!)
-Cocoa Powder Beverage
-Peanut Butter (I wish the packaging was still the same today)
-Crackers
-FRH
-Accessory Packet with Coffee and other standard components
Some random closeups for those interested:
And the final result!
First off, the chicken salsa smelled amazing. As soon as I bit into a piece of it, it had that combination of immense sourness combined with bitterness. As one could probably imagine, it's not exactly akin to a nice steak dinner. So I ended passing on the remainder of that. But hey, we're not done yet! The Lorna Doone cookies tasted great! Heck, I'd say they taste better than brand new ones you can buy in the store today. I don't know if the cause of their great taste is aging or a recipe change. It had a slight vanilla taste and were enjoyable overall. The Jolly Rancher candies tasted great but they were stuck to the packaging so I struggled opening the little packs. As you can see in the above picture I only bothered to open two before I gave up. I did finish them off though. The crackers, peanut butter and cocoa were both good, as usual. I've yet to experience bad MRE crackers, peanut butter and/or cocoa. I even had those items in a C Ration a few weeks ago and even THAT tasted good! Explain your wizardry, food scientists!
So, we've concluded that the Chicken with Salsa was no longer good. While they no longer title this entree Chicken with Salsa, they actually ended up renaming it to "Chicken Fajita" later on. The last year it was produced was in 2013. I've had a fresher version of this entree before it was okay. Unfortunately I didn't have one laying around so I'll probably just grab an entree from this CR1M and have that tonight. Thanks for reading!
Edit: While reading the labels on the Lorna Doone cookies and Jolly Rancher candies, it was weird to not see a website listed or a mention about Twitter/Facebook. Bit of a culture shock for me lol. I do know the internet was around in 1998 and many people knew about it so I'm still a bit surprised at the fact that there's not even a website listed.
