goblinbox

In which I eat REALLY OLD FOOD. For fun!

I’d never eaten an MRE in my life. So it was about time, I think.

MRE stands for, obviously (not) enough, “meal, ready-to-eat.” If that doesn’t convince you that that military is awesome, I don’t know what will. Because HELLO? MEAL, READY-TO-EAT? What?!

Anyway. My dad rolled into town yesterday, and when my brother and I were over visiting him he produced a couple of vegetarian MREs from the case of meals, ready-to-eat that my uncle had given to him. I immediately freaked right out with joy because I’d had no idea there was such a thing as a vegetarian MRE, and I pretty much wanted to eat one on the spot except I’d just had a Gardenburger.

Behold! Two vegetarian MREs of my very own! They’re adorable, dense little aardvarks of beige-colored food goodness, OMG would you just LOOK AT THEM:

MREs are irradiated and VERY well-packaged (read: you could probably store one under water for a year), so they last a disturbingly remarkably long time. People have been known to eat them five, ten, even fifteen (or more!) years after they were manufactured without dying.

Each meal contains about 1,300 calories (nearly an entire day’s worth of calories for me) and weighs probably 1-1/2 pounds.

I opened one of the packages on the spot and oohed and aahed over the contents, and then I got online and read about C rations (what grandpa ate in WWII), K rations, and MCI (what dad ate in Vietnam), (all of which came complete with four cigarettes at every single meal), MREs, FSRs (they have caffeinated gum in them, for reals) and other kinds of pre-packaged meals (like HDRs – humanitarian daily rations).

My dad, who couldn’t use his computer because I was in the way, commented that he could almost see the blog post taking form in my head. “You’ll have a few thousand words, probably,” he remarked.

“Oh, man! I totally want to try the Indian food meals!” I replied, apropos of nothing. “And look! Omelets! There’s no fuckin’ way those are edible!” I tried to get dear ol’ dad to give me all of the vegetarian MREs he had – apparently meal 12 is a rice and bean burrito! – but he would only part with the pasta dishes because he doesn’t like noodles.

Today, I decided to go ahead and eat one of my precious veggie MREs. It was labeled “Meal, Ready-to-Eat, Individual, Vegetarian, Menu No. 14,” and contained the following items:

Pasta with Vegetables in Alfredo Style Sauce
TS Fruit (Pineapple)
Granola Bar
Peanut Butter
Crackers
Fruit Filled Bar
Hot Sauce
Accessory Packet D (Lemon Tea w/Sugar, Apple Cider, Salt, Chewing Gum, Matches, Toilet Tissue, Towelette)
Spoon
Flameless Heater

Yay! Science! Quite possibly fatal science! Let’s rock this project!

I opened the granola bar first. It was technically edible, but the oils in it had gone rancid some years ago. I ate about 20% of it, but the smell bugged me. If I was truly hungry, though, I would have eaten it anyway. It may not have contained all the nutritional value it once did, but I’m sure it was harmless.

The fruit bar didn’t smell or taste bad, but it did look a little weird – the fruit had turned black, and the bar was kinda smashed. I took a couple of nibbles, but didn’t finish it.

The accessory pack is the best part because it not only has salt, matches, and toilet paper, but it also contains the famous tiny glass bottle of Tabasco sauce that MREs are famous for:

The crackers also smelled just slightly rancid, but were certainly edible. I put some of the fortified peanut butter on them. I was certain the peanut butter would smell off because it contains so much oil, but it didn’t. I ate one cracker and about a third of the peanut butter.

Then, feeling a little nervous, I turned to the most foreign and interesting part of the MRE: the flameless ration heater. I read the directions twice, grabbed my water bottle and pouch of pasta, and proceeded to “cook” my dinner.

The directions have you open the heater bag, insert your entrée, and add a few ounces of water. Then you fold the bag over and put the whole thing back into the entrée’s box. Let it sit horizontally for a minute, then prop it on a “rock or something” (that’s verbatim from the instructions, I kid you not) for another eleven minutes. Apparently the heater is non-toxic and can safely be thrown away.

I nuked a mug of hot water, poured the apple cider mix into it, and drank it while my entrée was heating. The cider tasted just fine.

The heater bag emits steam and makes homey little gurgling noises while it heats your food. It’s SO FREAKING COOL. It’s charming as hell because it’s warm, food-oriented, and a bitchin’ use of science. I can imagine it being really pleasant if you were somewhere cold and/or dark, because you could hold the thing while your food was heating and feel good for a few minutes.

Lacking a rock in my bedroom, I leaned mine against a wooden asana next to my yoga mat. I’m such a fucking hippie.

The entrée, when I opened it, was definitely hot. It was, I think, supposed to resemble shells and cheese, but I don’t know if the sauce was actually supposed to be cheddar-colored or if it had discolored with age. It had virtually no aroma. I tentatively took a bite.

Amazingly enough, the peas were still pea-shaped and had even retained the slightest amount of texture. I can’t recall what other vegetables were in there… carrots, maybe? The dish was much more palatable after I salted it, and that’s saying something since I never salt anything.

About an hour after I ate the entrée, I mixed up the lemon iced tea drink mix. It tasted just like instant iced tea. I don’t know that I’ve ever drunk two instant drink mixes in one day before in my life!

The pineapple and the gum remain unopened. I’m definitely curious to see how the pineapple will look. I expect that the gum will be indistinguishable from new gum.

I learned how to date the meal, and it turns out that the components were packed sometime in late 2000, making the meal just shy of a decade old. The Tabasco has 1008 stamped on it, which means it was packaged on January 8, 2001.

I saw nothing that would make me suspect the safety of the food – no bloated packaging, no spores or mold on the food – but its age makes me wonder if I should really be eating it. (Hah! Too late!) Plus my dad has eaten some out of the same case and he didn’t drop dead, so it’s not like I’m undertaking a dangerous activity.

All in all, a really fun and weird experiment, and I pretty much haven’t had to leave my room all day.

In conclusion, the heaters are AWESOME, the food is probably meh if you ever have to eat it for any reason other than for fun, the technology that allows this stuff to still be edible after a decade is AMAZING, and the fact that I actually ate it means I’m crazy brave and fierce!

Want more pics? View my goofy MRE gallery.

Update: The gum was hard but otherwise totally fine.
Update: The pineapple smelled like pineapple and was juicy, but it was also brown. I didn’t eat it.
Update: MREs can be purchased on eBay. There’s a bunch of people out there who apparently collect them, and others who stock them in case of The End Of The World, and others who stock them In Case Of Emergency and others who take them camping and still others who are clearly batshit insane militia people. Point is, the vegetarian MREs are often sold separately! Yay!
Update: Now that I’ve eaten two of these things, I can probably go the entire rest of my life without needing to eat any more of them. They’d make killer diet food, I think.

In which we talk about breakfast! Yum! Because while I read a lot of involved, uplifting, active, and self-referential blogs, personally I’m just not that interesting. Plus: there’s a bunch of food porn!

Yesterday I was craving a big old bowl of the Egyptian breakfast food known as ful medames. The stuff is just so delicious I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Since my shift today didn’t start until one o’clock, I got up and took myself to the grocery store this morning. I didn’t go to Loney’s because they don’t carry fava beans and I never can find any pita bread there. Instead, I took my brother’s truck and went over to Super 1. It was gigantic:

There, I spent about two million years fifteen minutes looking for fava beans and pita bread. They were there, but not where I thought they would be, and I must have covered two thirds of the store’s square footage before I located them.

Then I went home and watched this video again on my iPod Touch, because it’s my favorite recipe for ful and I couldn’t remember how much lemon juice to use:

After that, I cooked up a big old batch of beans with garlic and lemon and garnished it with olive oil, parsley, tomato, radish, hard boiled egg, green onion, picked vegetables, and olives. It looked really pretty plated up:

And then?

And I eated it! With whole wheat pita bread! OMG teh yum!

(G’ma said the concoction “looked pretty, but didn’t taste all that good.” This is because I did not salt it per about ten recipes I’ve read which don’t call for salt. At all. Apparently you’re supposed to salt at the table. Which I did!)

The last time I had ful was in Brooklyn, in an Egyptian place around the corner from Deboka’s brownstone. It was freakin’ delicious there, too, and came with a giant squeeze bottle of tahini (!!!) and even had green peppers in it.

The time before that, I made a batch myself and packed it in a bento box with some falafel:

And here’s an entire gallery of fuul porn, just in case you doubted the status of my fandom for this dish! (Go look. Srsly. I’ll wait.)

Ful is the bestest, cheapest, fillingest breakfast ever. Bonus: it has the added benefit of giving you garlic breath first thing in the morning!

And yes, apparently I did just write an entire post about beans. Guess who needs to get laid?

In which it’s like I’m turning over a new leaf or something, what with all the being organized and shit.

This is how on top of the holiday game I am:

I had my Christmas letter written yesterday, when it was still November! I have created a Christmas card list! I have purchased over half of the gifts I need! Tomorrow, since I have the day off, I’ll probably dig the box of santas out of the attic and help G’ma decorate the house.

Superfreaky, yo. I’m all in the Xmas spirit, bitches.

In other news, last night I got my knit on while watching Doctor Who¹ and eating insanity bread² on Teh BF’s couch. Using some of the yarn she gave me, I started this hat for him. Yay!

—
¹ We’ve watched all of seasons 1, 2, and 4 of the new Doctor Who, and have only two episodes left of season 3 and then we have NO. WHO. LEFT.
We’ve also watched all of the Torchwood episodes, so we’re kinda freaking the fuck out because what delicious Brit sci-fi will we watch next?
² Insanity bread is an invention of Teh BF’s involving frying slices of French bread in olive oil and butter, rubbing them with raw garlic, and topping them with brie and sliced tomato and avocado. It’s hella good and it looks like this.

In which the AC adapter has arrived!

Kaje and I watched an episode of Doctor Who last night while eating tostadas on his couch. I love Doctor Who. I love tostadas. (Couches are pretty cool too. Pretty much a win/win scenario, if you ask me.)

Then we slept for ten hours.

This morning when I got home to shower and change, I found that my new AC adapter had arrived. W00t! I immediately ran upstairs and plugged it into the ol’ IBM A30… and damn if it didn’t just boot right up! I’m so glad to have my laptop back again.

Maybe now I can get my iTunes library off of that damn failing IDE-drive-in-a-USB-enclosure and onto my laptop, where it fucking belongs.

In other news, payday has come and gone. After paying all my bills I have $147 to live on until the 15th. I usually pay only half of my bills per paycheck, but this month I paid everything with this check so I can buy a ticket to Vegas with my next one.

Yay! Ticket to Vegas!

In which I raid the ‘fridge with possibly dire consequences.

There’s a potluck at work the first Friday of each month, and the left over food tends to sit in the ‘fridge for awhile before people remember to take their Tupperware containers home. This means that if you’re me – and therefore too lazy to walk across the street and buy a sandwich on your lunch hour – you dig through the leftovers and eat stuff that’s many days old.

I didn’t eat anything for breakfast today, so around 1 o’clock I was starving and nuked the rest of the black bean soup. Then, on my lunch hour, I tried to eat some of the thai noodle salad but it was sour and I tossed it out unfinished… but not before eating several bites and trying to decide if it was really off or if I was just being a dork.

So I could be dying right this very minute. Srsly. Because I feel a little funny.

Hopefully I won’t get food poisoning, because that would totally put a wrench in my let’s-go-eat-at-Kelly’s-after-work plans with K!

In which there are superdelicious foodz!

The Best Aunt Ever™ picked me up after work last night and took me to College Place for dinner at a tiny little place called Bangkok 103.

College Place is a vegetarian haven because apparently the town is comprised mainly of a Christian sect – Adventist, I believe – that is entirely vegetarian. They have a kick-ass crunchy veggie store I have yet to see the inside of, and the stores in the area all have rather extensive vegetarian food sections because of them.

Bangkok 103 is run by a wife/husband team and is reservation only. I had Thai iced tea and veggie curry with tofu and it was wonderful, as was the company of my dad’s sister (who taught me how to twist and do the monkey when I was quite little, and is therefore practically the most important figure of my formative years).

After dinner, which she paid for, we dropped by her house and she gave me two bags full of books and I fell in love with her handsome boy dog, a sweet shepherd who shared his “bunny” (all stuffed toys are bunnies to him) with me. After that I was SUDDENLY FREAKING EXHAUSTED because of this never-to-be-sufficiently-damned COLD and went home and went to bed, where I slept for fifteen hours before coming back to work.

In other very tragic news. Lips the Office Fish died today. It’s a sad day for the entire office.

In which Xmas day was super plus fun!

Christmas Day totally rocked.

It’s been years since I’ve celebrated this holiday with my blood family, and it was really great to be at Gramma’s house with a whole passel of aunts and uncles and cousins and their spouses and parents. We ate dinner mid-afternoon, then Dave went to get his kids and we opened gifts around three in the afternoon.

Yes, I said three. Three! In the afternoon! It took forever to get to the present-opening; I thought I was gonna die. (I got cute red jammies from Gramma, two gift certificates, earrings, coffee, mugs, candy, and lots of other fun stuff. It was awesome.)

My band wanted to record a demo that afternoon, but I didn’t go. While their enthusiasm is awesome, as far as I know we don’t have even three songs worked out yet. The idea is that we need to slap together a demo and start booking gigs so that we will have a reason to practice… we’re all people who write papers the night before they’re due, I guess.

In completely unrelated news, I have a dental appointment on January 2nd. Yay! I need to get my teeth cleaned so bad it’s disgusting, but this particular office didn’t let me make an appointment for a cleaning – I have to got through their evaluation and intake crap first, and get x-rays. They’d better get me back in the next fucking day, though, because I think my teeth are so plaque-ridden that I’m running a low-level infection in my gums. Which is totally gross, and which makes my mouth taste like tin foil, and which makes my tongue all white and gross when I wake up every morning. I’ll probably need another planing and scaling, which is expensive and takes four visits, but which keeps one’s gums from receding and leaves one’s mouth pristine.

First the uterus. Then the teeth. Next, the eyes. Eventually I’ll be practically normal!

In which this post covers everything that matters.

Work

Work last night? Verged on insane. I won’t get too jargony on y’all, but one of our servers ran out of disk space, which caused our internal apps to fail and a bunch of authentication errors for customers. Both the engineers were unavailable, so I just worked my arse off last night. I still had call-backs to do at a quarter of nine, and I’m usually done at least half an hour before that. Gah!

Music

RB picked me up at nine and took me to Barnaby’s for open mic. We found a drummer and a bassist to play with us and did a really mediocre version of Get Ready, followed by a fuckin’ smokin’ Stormy Monday. (Then we got off the bandstand ’cause we didn’t have anything else to do.)

A few people shook my hand and told me I’m awesome, which I always like to hear… particularly when the audience is comprised entirely of other musicians. RB and I talked about a bass player we’ll be auditioning this weekend, and then he dropped me off at home around eleven. I let my dog out for five minutes, then went up to bed and crashed.

Food

Tonight is the company Xmas party, which means not only do I get my dinner paid for, but I get off work early! W00t!

Sex

Actually, there’s no sex to speak of. I just thought it would be good if I used the word in a post once in awhile.

In which I enjoy a lovely, relaxing weekend at home.

Saturday I carried boxes down from the attic and Gramma and I spent the day redecorating for the holiday. All the framed photos from the corner cabinet were boxed up, all the Santas were unpacked, and things were dusted and arranged and displayed. We had fun.

Sunday I drove the car to the store; I get to drive the car this week since Gramma’s ankle is wrapped up and she can’t fit her foot into any of her shoes. When we got home, Gramma baked butterscotch oatmeal cookies.

Sunday night I cooked. I made Indian food: channa masala, cumin rice, and cucumber raita. Gramma had seconds. Then we had tea and cookies for dessert and discussed cake-baking.

I learned that when margarine first hit the market, the dairy farmers lobbied and made it illegal for margarine to be sold butter-colored. It used to come white with a small capsule of yellow food coloring it, and you’d pour the coloring in and mix it up yourself. If you got lazy, your margarine would end up with bright-yellow and white streaks in it. Weird little historical details such as these fascinate me.

In which I get my way! Amazing!

Today the guys at work gave me a UPS so I don’t have to shut my computer down at night. BOOYAH!

They also told me not to learn from this event that bitching will get me my way in the future. I promised them most emphatically that I do not now nor shall I ever think that. Never!

We had a potluck at work today. The food was killer. AND the entire office is all decorated with Xmas lights. You know how I feel about Xmas lights: I *heart* them!

In other news, the album is out! Dig some clips:

You can buy it here. (I can’t give it away because I don’t own it – I just sang backup – and it was expensive to record, and there were investors that need to be paid back. So buy it if you’re feeling like you need some nice spiritually positive tuneage in your library. (If you’re really poor and you really want it, email me and we’ll see what can be done.)) I like the album overall and I’m proud that I’m on it, but mostly I just liked singing into this baby.

In other other news, thank God it’s Friday. I’m so ready to lie around watching vids on the ol’ laptop all day tomorrow. This working full-time crap is for chumps, I’m tellin’ ya.

Behold today’s quick-and-easy soup recipe!

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