Day 7: Sunday lunch: #14 - Pasta with Vegetables in Alfredo Sauce
I decided to go ahead and finish off the week of MREs with this Pasta in Alfredo Sauce MRE that's been sitting in my garage for the past few years. I wasn't ever particularly excited about trying this one but it was in easy reach and I figured "what the heck?...let's see if it's still good". This one was from late 2000 so it was about 4.5 years old.
Talk about a veggie-all-the-way MRE - check out the contents: pasta in alfredo sauce entree, pineapple, vegetable crackers, peanut butter, fruit bar, granola bar, iced tea, and hot apple cider. I certainly wasn't expecting any meat-based products in there, it just looks like they went the extra mile to "vegetize" this one.
While the entree was heating up, I snacked on vegetable crackers and peanut butter. I always thought the vegetable crackers went best with cheese but this wasn't bad. Here's a pic:
Vegetable Crackers and Peanut Butter
There's definitely an art form to opening the peanut butter packet and spreading it on the crackers. If you tear off a corner and the hole is too big, you squeeze out these huge globs of peanut butter on each cracker and as soon as you try to spread it out with your spoon (or finger), your cracker breaks up into a hundred pieces. Or if you cut it too small (like I did in the pic above), you get these dainty little peanut butter swirls and if you're eating around anyone else, they're going to look at your crackers...look at you ...and snicker. Ideally, you cut a hole just right and you get a nice flat ribbon of peanut butter about 1/4 inch wide. This makes it easy to cover each cracker with just the right amount of peanut butter and you won't have to worry about trying to spread it out manually.
With my snack finished, I took the freshly heated entree out of the heater, cut it open, and had a look:
Pasta with Vegetables in Alfredo Sauce
I have to admit...when I first looked at this entree, I thought, "yuck" and thought about ditching it. I'm not a huge fan of peas and there were just way too many of the little guys in there to make it look appetizing. But I gave it a sniff and since it didn't smell rancid, I decided that with enough tobasco sauce and salt, it would be ok. And sure enough, it was. I was actually surprised at how good it was. If I didn't look too closely at it, I could almost not tell that it was a vegetarian MRE. It could very well have had some sort of chicken in there that was cooked down enough to make it mushy - that's the kind of texture the entree had.
The entree went pretty quick and I was still a bit hungry so I dug into the side of pineapple. This is the one single component from this MRE that I could tell was four years old. A few days ago, I had a fresh pineapple side and the pineapple was nice and yellow. This older side's pineapple was definitely a darker color - still yellow, just darker. The taste was spot on, though - nothing bad about it. Maybe it wasn't as crisp as the newer side, but it was still good.
I thought it was funny that they included both a granola bar and fruit bar in the same MRE. You normally don't see many bars at all and all of sudden, here's two. They both look to be commercial items packed in MRE pouches:
Fruit Bar and Granola Bar
I didn't eat the granola bar but I did eat the fruit bar for dessert. I was a little crumbly (probably the age) but tasted just fine.
