Weeds and MREs

It's weed-eating season. I'm starting to clear the garden beds, and all those tender bits of green are just too tempting to resist. I was amused last night to notice that Sophia had cleaned her plate of the cleavers with garlic and scallions, and had barely touched the kale (one of our winter mainstays). I guess she's getting tired of the monotony, too. This afternoon I had dandelion buds with lemon butter, and we've got a bowl of mustard greens and garlic mustard greens waiting in the fridge.

My shiitake log "bloomed" this week too, and we had those for dinner tonight with shallots and a red wine sauce. The rest of the meal consisted of flank steak, boiled beets, and sauerkraut, with an apple-oatmeal crisp for dessert. A lot of winter fare with just a touch of spring.

At the other end of the food(like) spectrum, Greg decided to break open his "week's supply of food" MRE box at lunch today, and try them out. The box is about four years old, but he hadn't opened it yet. The MREs were not (as I had expected) freeze-dried; they really are intended to be eaten straight out of the foil wrapper. Between the three of us, we opened six different packages to try -- "Peanut Butter," "Crackers," "Cheese Tortellini in Tomato Sauce," "Mexican Style Rice," "Cherry Blueberry Cobbler," and "Beverage Base Raspberry." Sophia and I tasted the rice, and Greg ate the other five.

He said the peanut butter tasted like peanut butter (aside from being sweetened and fortified,) and the crackers, though bland, were unremarkable. The most unusual thing about the beverage base (a.k.a. kool-aid) was that it was sugar free; he wondered what was the point of including it at all, since it has no nutritive value. I speculated that it might be intended to mask the taste of swamp water (properly boiled and sterilized swamp water, of course, but even so...) The ingredients lists were surprisingly ordinary -- most of the chemicals were already familiar from supermarket packages.

The big disappointments were the, um, edible food-like substances whose names implied actual recipes. The tortellini and the rice were incredibly mealy, and the cobbler was "the texture of overdone oatmeal."

Sophia and I both stopped eating after two or three bites. I found the chili powder flavor overwhelming, but it was the mealiness that really did me in. I'm not sure how Greg managed to choke down two entire packets of that stuff, but I guess we already knew he's not a picky eater.

Then again, Sophia's not a picky eater either, at least not by my standards. She's never even come close to the "eats nothing but mac and cheese" status of other kids her age. But she wasn't willing to finish the package of rice, even after she begged Greg to let her try it.