Food Choice of the Military

Meals of the Military

Some time ago, a man who my father works with returned from deployment. When he returned, he brought back some of the food packages that soldiers receive while they are on duty. I have often wondered how our soldiers prepare cooked meals and exactly what they eat. I always thought it must be difficult to prepare food for them, considering that it has to withstand different temperatures and has to be non-perishable, yet provide them with the necessary amount of energy and nutrition, and that the food must be pretty gross.

For the most part, the food turned out to be OK, but tasted like chemicals. The lack of variety was also somewhat disappointing. 

These food packages, called Meals Ready to Eat (MRE), typically contained two meals, a condiment like jelly or peanut butter, a large white cracker, some sort of fruit preserves or sauce, fruit flavored carbohydrate powder for a drink, a cookie or small cake of some sort, and cutlery. 

Image from mreinfo.com

This package had a bit more in the package than we had, but the same flat brown cardboard boxes and green and brown bags are the same. 

For the meals, I saw flavors like pork sausage with gravy, pork ribs, and beef stew. I had a bite of the beef stew, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. It was definitely stewy, but it didn't taste as chemically as I was anticipating.

If you are interested to see how to actually cook the meals, click here. 

 I personally liked the white crackers and the cookies and cakes the best. The same large white cracker was the same in every package, accompanied with jelly. The jelly tasted like it was almost certainly purple sugar chemicals, and I doubt they ever saw a grape. The cookies and cakes were actually quite good. I had an M&M cookie and an oatmeal cookie and carrot cake in the rest of them. The cookies looked like and tasted like a regular, yet rather large, off the shelf crumbly cookies. The carrot cake was hard, but it tasted OK. I never actually tried any of the fruit preserves or sauce, but my grandmother liked them well enough. The only things I really couldn't stand were the carbohydrate drinks. The only flavor they had in any of the packages was orange, yet if it hadn't been labeled on the package as so, I wouldn't have been able to tell what the flavor was. It was simply orange chemical water. 

Image from theepicenter.com

The crackers were actually pretty good. They tasted alright on their own or with peanut butter or a better jelly than the one provided.

Here is the jelly packet. I never saw any peanut butter in any of the packages, but I have seen some in pictures online. The crackers actually tasted pretty good with peanut butter as opposed to the jelly.

Here are the different fruit preserves or sauces that were in the package. 

After opening the package of pineapple, there is a thick grey plastic bag that holds the actual fruit.

When I opened the bag and smelled the fruit, it also smelled like chemicals. I never tried any of the fruit, but apparently it isn't that bad.

When I made the orange drink, it basically looked like orange Gatorade. Nothing too fancy. 

Banana Bread

 Finished Banana Bread

We have all bought food that we just haven't gotten around to eating. It goes bad, we feel guilty when we throw away the food, and we get frustrated when we waste money. Sometimes we are aware that there is food in our fridge that is going out of date, but it doesn't make for good leftovers. Luckily, bananas are not one of those types of foods. 

Originally found in East Asia, bananas are one of the most popular fruits today. (here). I mean, we all know the Chiquita Banana theme song, right? Even when bananas start to speckle, they are perfectly good to eat. When they start to become severely speckled, they are still capable of being used for baking.

I just so happened to have a few bananas laying around that were in the really speckly stage of life, and I didn't really want to eat them as is, so it was time to make banana bread. The recipe I used was originally for a banana-pecan bread, but I prefer walnuts to pecans.

Original Recipe from The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook 

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flower

2/3 cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup butter/margarine

1 cup mashed banana (about 2 ripe large bananas)

1/2 cup pecans, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon grated lemon peel

2 eggs, slightly beaten

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9" by 5" loaf pan.

2. In large bowl, mix first 5 ingredients. With pastry blender or 2 knives used scissors fashion, cut butter or margarine until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in bananas, pecans, lemon peel, and eggs just until flavor is moistened. Spoon batter evenly into loaf pan.

3. Bake 55 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center of bread comes out clean. Cool bread in pan on wire rack 10 minutes; remove from pan and finish cooling on wire rack.

First, I used walnuts and craisins instead of pecans.I used 1/2 cup of walnuts and 1/2 cup of craisins. The walnuts were coarsely chopped, though. I used lemon juice because a lemon was not on hand.

 The bananas themselves were not ripe. I find the bread is much sweeter if the bananas are very freckled.

 After mixing the five dry ingredients together, I added the chopped butter, bananas, walnuts, craisins, lemon juice, and eggs. I didn't beat the eggs beforehand.

 When baking anything, its a good idea to get an idea of how easy it will be to get what you are baking out of the pan. It is pretty easy to get the bread out of the pan, but as a precaution I used cooking spray to line the bread pan and sprinkled flour into it.

 After preheating the oven to 350 degrees F, I poured the batter into the pan and stuck it into the oven. The mixture is not going to be watery like a cake batter.

  I really like this kind of bread. It is sweet and I think the walnuts go well with the banana flavor. It is very moist on the inside. I baked this for a total of 55 minutes, and it came out perfectly.

Finished product!

Coconut Custard Pie

Coconut Custard Pie

While I was walking through the grocery store a few days ago, I noticed that the produce section offered coconuts. For whatever reason, it sort of amazed me that coconuts were kinda small. As a kid, I had always imagined coconuts as bowling ball-sized missiles that could kill you if you walked under a coconut tree. I guess it would still hurt if you got hit by one, but the ones at the grocery store were pretty weeny and unimpressive. 

After mentioning this observation to a relative, they pulled out an old Coconut Custard Pie recipe that they said was a keeper and worked out really well. I really like coconut flavors and foods with coconut in them, but I've never really made anything with coconut. I've never cracked open a coconut, either. One day I will, but for this recipe I just used the pre-shredded stuff.

The original recipe:

5 eggs

1 stick margarine or butter at room temp

3/4 cup buttermilk

2 cups granulated sugar

1 cup coconut (Baker's)

1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring

2 9-inch pie shells

Mix all ingredients together.

Pour into two regular 9-inch shells

Bake at 300 degrees F for 40 minutes or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. 

My relative had made slight alterations to the recipe, so I just went along with what they did. 

Instead of 1 stick of margarine or butter, I used 2/3 stick, and I only used 1.5 cups of granulated sugar.

 To start the mixing process, I creamed the sugar and the butter together. It will still be kind of lumpy, but it makes the rest of the mixing a lot easier.

 To make buttermilk, I put 1 tablespoon of lemon juice into 1 cup of milk and let it sit for 10 minutes to thicken.

 After the buttermilk thickened, I put the eggs and the buttermilk along with the vanilla into the sugar-butter mixture.

 After mixing all of the ingredients together, I put in the coconut shreds. When you mix the ingredients, you will notice that the coconut will rise to the top because the coconut is lighter than the rest of the mixture.

 I wasn't sure if I needed the deeper or the thinner pie shells, so I just played it safe and got the deeper ones. The pies don't rise much at all, so it would be perfectly fine just to use the more shallow pie shells.

 Much to my amazement, the pies actually took around 80 minutes to bake. I have no idea why it took double the time because that never happened when my relative made it. If you check the pies after 40 minutes of baking and it looks like it didn't bake at all, it's fine to let it bake longer. I'm not sure if the oven just never came to temperature, but I was pretty bemused.

After it does bake, it should be golden brown on top. When you cut into it, the custard will be at the bottom and the top will be coconut. Just don't indulge too much. Custard is traditionally very fattening. 

Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

  

Finished Oatmeal Craisin cookies that I really like :)

 

Have you ever gone to a plate of cookies and picked up what you thought was a chocolate chip cookie, only to find out that it was one of those nasty oatmeal raisin cookies? Yea, me too. It's pretty disappointing. Most of the time, I don't like oatmeal cookies, let alone oatmeal. I'm not a huge fan of raisins, either. A few years ago, a family member bought some Quaker Oats Oatmeal, which came with a recipe for oatmeal cookies, and she decided to make them. Later, the same family member asked me to make the cookies for them. At first, I didn't like the cookies very much, but gradually I made a few alterations to the recipe to make them much more suited to my taste. 

Oatmeal cookies have been around for a long time, and oatmeal has been around even longer. Some of the first appearances of the cookie go back all the way to when the Romans first invaded England (More about history). I'm not certain if they were anything like the sugary cookies we have now, but the concept of a cookie made of oatmeal is practically ancient.

To me, a lot of today's oatmeal cookies are thin and bland. I really like large oatmeal cookies that are crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside with craisins and finely chopped walnuts in between. That sounds a lot better than dried oatmeal with raisins. I use the Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies by Quaker Oats (here), but I made a few alterations in the recipe that make these cookies one of my personal favorites. 

In the recipe, it calls for 1/2 cup plus 6 tablespoons of butter. In the cookies I make, I usually put an extra tablespoon of butter, just because I bake them longer than the recipe calls for.

The only other thing I changed in the actual ingredients is the raisins. Because I don't like raisins. Instead, I substitute them with a 1/2 cup of craisins and a 1/2 cup of FINELY chopped walnuts. .

They have to be the finely chopped walnuts, or they change the texture of the cookie.

Using a standing mixer really helps speed the process up a bit. It is really hard to mix after the oats are added.

These oatmeal cookies will turn out to be really big and almost fluffy. They have a great chewy texture in the middle without being gooey.

I make the dough balls about 1/4 of a cup to achieve what is to me the perfect size cookie.

Because the recipe calls for the cookies to be little tablespoon sized cookies, the bake time is shorter. Since the cookies will be so much bigger, they need to bake longer. I bake mine for 15 minutes and 30 seconds to achieve the golden brown look.

The finished product!

Apple Pies on a Whim

Picture I took of some of the apples that were picked.

At the present moment, apple picking season is in full swing! What does that mean to apple lovers everywhere? Cider, cobblers, applesauce, and PIE. 

A relative and a few friends decided to go apple picking at an orchard near us and brought back bags of apples, not really knowing what to do with them. So, in a spur-of-the-moment type of thing, we decided to make an apple pie. The pie, or what turned out to be pies, ended up varying from the original recipe (here) because we didn't really have a great dish to bake it in and we didn't have enough flour, since it was made on a whim with little to no preparations.

Below are some pictures depicting the process of how we ended up making our pie(s). For the filling, we just split the entire bowl between two pie dishes, although only one is pictured. For the crusts, the recipe calls for double the amount of pie crust in their original recipe, but we only made enough to cover the pies and not enough for the bottom layer. We used the graham cracker crust for the bottoms of the pies. It probably would have turned out a bit better if we hadn't used to graham cracker crusts. It's not entirely a bad alternative, though. 

Making the pie filling.                                                              Making the top of the pie crusts. 

Although it differed from the original recipe, it actually turned out pretty well. I wasn't so fond of the graham cracker crust on the bottom because it ended up slightly burnt. Oh well. I would advise following the recipe, although I did like making two pies instead of one. 

This looks like an angry face to me >w<

Here are both of the pies we ended up making.

Recreational Baking

Chocolate Mice that I made 

Cooking: (n). 1. The act of preparing food to eat.

Most everyone has to do it. Some enjoy spending time and effort cooking more than others. Some, like myself, find it to be an irksome and mundane task. For many of us average folk, preparing the same old breakfasts, lunches, and dinners week in and week out becomes a chore very quickly. That is why I infinitely prefer baking over cooking.

Baking: (n). 1. Cooking food without direct exposure to a flame, typically in an oven or over a hot surface.

Simply put, baking is making an edible treat for yourself or someone else. Unlike cooking, you can make what you bake cute, colorful, and appealing as well as delicious. Some of my favorite things to make are chocolate mousse, cookies, and yes, cake.

I don't really plan on making a career of baking or anything like that. To me, it is just an enjoyable hobby. It's entertaining to see what you can create with food and how your creation turns out once you have finished it.

                                    "If you're afraid of butter, use cream."

-Julia Child