Review: MRE review 1/2 day's rations

I had the opportunity to take a pile of Australian issue MRE components to work to test out, following on from a small selection of them falling in my lap from more than one undisclosed source. I will not be on-selling these, they're for my own entertainment and preparedness.

I wanted to give myself a good trial, so selected a full menu to replace what I would normally eat during the day at work. It is common to see "8,700kJ" as the average recommended intake and I have breakfast, lunch and two breaks at work, so I selected accordingly.


For breakfast I had a brown of muesli/porridge, which I mad with boiling water and a sachet of instant creamer. It made a solid, heavy and hearty porridge, which was flavoursome and had enough variety of ingredients to have a good and palatable consistency.










I had the "blueberry and apple" cereal bar for my mid-morning snack, it was again, dense and for all intents and purposes, could have come out of any kids

Interestingly when I looked up the nutritional content of current US issued MRE kits, they suggested that service-members (who were classified as highly active men between the ages of 18 and 30) typically use about 4,200 Calories a day. The conversion is  1 kJ = 0.2 Calories (Cals)or 1 Calorie = 4.2 kJ, giving a figure of 17,640 kJ a little over double the "average adult intake diet". Bear that in mind later.

Lunch was a bit more involved; a sachet of freeze-dried rice, beef and onion stew, a can of "diced two-fruits in syrup" with a sachet of tropical flavour Thorzt sports drink powder to drink.

The dehydrated rice was reconstituted with a canteen cup's worth of boiling water, and once ready, I simply upended it into a bowl, and added the cold stew to it. I could have tried reheating the stew, either by suspending its retort in a bowl of boiling water, or throwing it all in the microwave, but this would totally have been cheating.

It was a pretty decent meal, there were enough chunky bits of meat and onion to make it more than just thick gravy, but it was hardly a hefty chew. The stew itself was quite palatable cold, but a quick mix with the hot rice made it all the better.

Obviously you have to reconstitute the rice to make it in any way enjoyable, but it will reconstitute in cold water, if you don't have a source of heat, or are under restrictions.



I finished off my lunch with the can of fruit in syrup, which I popped open with my trusty EDC P-38 opener, and tucked into the just-as-off-the-shelf canned fruit. Nothing special to report there though.












For my afternoon break and to snack on in e afternoon, I had selected the chocolate drink, infamous canned cheese and even more infamous chocolate ration. Again, boiling water into the chocolate drink, which made a quite passable hot chocolate.

If I had wanted it to be extra creamy, I could have saved the instant creamer from breakfast and added it, but I think it didn't need it.





The Bega canned cheese, reported to me as a legendary constipation cause, appeared to be exactly the Kraft cheese stick cheese, in a can. It was firm but elastic, and "split" rather than crumbled. It was tasty enough, and reminded me of school-yard snack breaks for sure.

Lastly was the equally infamous legendarily laxative chocolate ration.  I don't actually enjoy milk chocolate, but I wanted the full experience, and even with all the food I'd included in my half-day's ration, I wanted to make a real showing of it.

I snacked on it throughout the afternoon and finished it just before going home, and suffered no ill effects.

Perhaps the cheese and chocolate battled each other into a stalemate, but I was the victor.

Adding up the constituents, I had had 8907kJ (2129Calories) in this selection, and this was just my daytime food.

All this, and I was pretty full, and certainly didn't feel that I had gone without. If anything, I felt I had wanted to eat the cheese or the chocolate, but not both.

It's also worth noting that this only made up a small portion of the full ADF ration-pack. Given that, and the full kJ load in that full pack, you could make one of these stretch a long way, or spread them out between a number of people to make a survival situation both more palatable, but also more secure.

If you can lay your hands on an MRE, you'd have to go a long way to find a better, more densely packed, supplied and readily consumable source of nutrition and energy than the ADF ration-pack. If you're in a position to lay hands on one, do it.

If you're in a field where you might be able to swap out, try swapping for an ADF rat-pack, you won't be disappointed.

Home Front: Cherry Harvest

This past solstice weekend, I took my whole family up to a cherry orchard, and we spent an hour or so, three adults, and late teen and two little ones, running about, foraging and feeding, till we had 10 kg of cherries picked, (and who knows how many eaten in the process).

This particular orchard was selling them at $10/kg so whilst we did spend a lot, it was massively less than the $20-$30/kg that they are, at the shops currently.

This is my partner Anstia helping Triceratops Girl collecting cherries (from every ladder they came across).
We aimed to take only the good fruit, and as few stalks as possible, because that sped up the prepping time later on, but does also speed up the rotting process (its an open wound ...).

Here is a bowl full of this years harvest, served chilled on a 30oC evening. However, 10 kg (22lbs) of any fresh produce is a lot of organic matter for even a tribe like mine to consume, especially a rich a source as these cherries were. So, it was time to can and jam!



My family (mothers side) is Danish, so we celebrate a Danish Giftmas, on the 24th, and one of my favourite deserts is the dark cherry soup, Kirsebærsuppe. We used 4 kg of cherries to make a giant pot of the soup, which left us with 2L (0.5gal) of leftover soup, which we jarred up hot in an old olive jar.

I wanted to try a few other ways of preserving the cherries, without making jam (we have the last two seasons of fruit windfalls as jam still and are just finishing off jars from the first year we did it. Some went into the duck-stuffing for example).

We candied (boiling in 1:1 sugar:water by mass), then dehydrated one set of pitted cherries. This worked out really well and we filled two trays of my dehydrator with them, and two jam-jars as a result.

I also preserved a jar's worth in simple syrup (which has a terrible leaking habit, seemed to bypass the seals on its jars every time I make it). These were unpitted and I expect them to take a while to candy up, and slowly leach flavour into the syrup.

Here's a side-by-side of the cherry soup,  beside the one of the jars of pitted cherries in Glögg. Glögg is a spiced, sweetened red wine (in this case) with an alcohol content of 12% vol which always seems to have more kick that expected. Perfect for preserving fruit and will make for a welcome treat come winter.

We used the similar sized olive jars as for the soup, and filled them with the pitted cherries, followed by a 750mL bottle of Glögg in each. Perfect size!

A welcome side effect from doing the candied cherries was that the syrup that remained was infused with the cherry juices that cooked out, and I was not going to let THAT go to waste. So, we found some swing top bottles that I had been keeping (always prepared), and funneled it in.

This home made cordial was almost black, it was such a dark red, and tastes amazing diluted with water, soda water and poured over ice-cream. I imagine I will make use of it in constructing boozy cocktails in the near future.

All of these preservation methods (candying, pickling, canning in syrup and reducing to cordial) are all super simple, cheep and will result in a long lasting commodity and resource, for trade, and off-season boosts to our table.

Lots of preppers recommend having tradable items, and this is a great example of one we're only too happy to produce and stock.

Here's the one tool that made the whole job SO much easier (and praise be my partner Omega, who used it to such effect). A cherry pitter!

This little tool took so much trouble out of de-stoning the 8kg or so of cherries we needed pitted. If you plan on doing a big load of cherries, you would do well to pick one or two of these up. Here's a cool link for a person who made their own!