"C-rat" gourmets

[SHOOTER1]

the Han and M************ were the best of all the meals, i never had to worry about my next meal, cause nobody else wanted them, i always has 4 or 5 cases of just Ham ands under my rack in camp, id trade anything except cigs , TP, matches, salt ,pepper coffie, and coca for them, with tabasco, you cant beat them, if you can heat them, as for the cigs, the Salem and Kools got me the rest of what i needed , when needed, i still have a full unopened case of them ,saving for a rainy day, i quit smoking a few years ago, cold turkey for 3 years, went camping and opened a box of Cs packed in 44, since i dont waste anything, i smoked a pack of Pall Malls , that first 2 drags put me on my butt, it was the best cigg i have ever smoked, i instantly jumped in my truck and drove 30 miles to a store and bought a carton of Pall Malls, been back smoken ever since. IF ANYONE OUT THERE CAN GIT OR KNOWS OF WHERE I CAN STILL BUY C-RATS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW, IVE CHECKED OUT SURPLUS , GUNSHOWS EVERYWHERE, I CANT GIT THEM ANYMORE, I REALLY DO WANT MORE OF THEM ,SPECIALLY HAM ANDS,ANYONE?

[NEWB]

Shooter,
I think they were outlawed by the Geneva Convention as Cruel and Unusual Punishment. LOL. I loved the Ham and Eggs Chopped.

[mrbsox]

BUMP

Just looking thru some old stuff, and bumping this back up for the 'New-Bee's'

Terry

[USMC0311]

Originally posted by NEWB
Shooter,
I think they were outlawed by the Geneva Convention as Cruel and Unusual Punishment. LOL. I loved the Ham and Eggs Chopped.

yep smelled like cat food...looked like cat food...I always wondered if the taste was like cat food....

If anyone knows pleeze give me a heads-up...

fars as gettin C's I think the C connoisseurs have already eaten them all.

[Barrio_rat]

Joe T... don't trust what others say.. Find out for yourself... I'll buy ya the can, if ya want...

I don't know what cat food tastes like - but cat ain't half bad. My baby girl swears by dog food - freaks the wife out some LOL

[USMC0311]

Originally posted by Barrio_rat
Joe T... don't trust what others say.. Find out for yourself... I'll buy ya the can, if ya want...

I don't know what cat food tastes like - but cat ain't half bad. My baby girl swears by dog food - freaks the wife out some LOL

Thanks for the offer Rat. The reason I asked if someone else knows, was to find out if they was anyone more foolish/curious than me. Dog is good. I seen too many flat cats to even want to taste one ov'em. I hope the Wife and Girls are doin good as you "smart-ass"

Semper Fi, Brother

[Barrio_rat]

Better a "smart-ass" than a “dumb-ass”!

Wife and kids are doing very well. Can go on and on about that - short and sweet version is, oldest is doing well and makin me proud, youngest is amazing.

Only reason I know cat is any good is because I used to hit this restaurant in Okinawa - it got closed down for a while cuz they found dogs and cats hangin in the freezer. Some of you may remember it Ghengis Khans Mongolian Barbeque - near Futenma. They were closed in late ‘89 and reopened in the Spring of ‘90. Good eats!

[thedrifter]

FOX HOLE DINNER FOR TWO
(Turkey & Chicken Poulette)

1 can chicken and noodles
1 can turkey loaf, cut up into pieces
1 can cheese spread
12 spoons milk
Crackers from one C-Ration can, crumbled
Salt & pepper to taste
2 spoons butter or oil or fat-
2 spoons flour
3 dashes TABASCO

Melt butter oil or fat, add flour and stir until
smooth. Add milk and continue to cook until cheese melts and sauce is even. Empty cans of turkey loaf and chicken noodles into cheese sauce.
Season with TABASCO, salt & pepper to taste and continue cooking. Cover poulette with crumbled crackers and serve piping hot.



Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

Don't forget the P-38........





The Folding Can Opener

The P38

Story by Maj. Renita Foster

It was developed in just 30 days in the summer of 1942 by the Subsistence Research Laboratory in Chicago. And never in its 52-year history has it been known to break, rust, need sharpening or polishing. Perhaps that is why many soldiers, past and present, regard the P-38 C-ration can opener as the Army's best invention.

C-rations have long since been replaced with the more convenient Meals, Ready to Eat (MREs), but the fame of the P-38 persists, thanks to the many uses stemming from the unique blend of ingenuity and creativity all soldiers seem to have.

"The P-38 is one of those tools you keep and never want to get rid of," said Sgt. Scott Kiraly, a military policeman. "I've had my P-38 since joining the Army 11 years ago and kept it because I can use it as a screwdriver, knife, anything."

The most vital use of the P-38, however, is the very mission it was designed for, said Fort Monmouth, N.J., garrison commander Col. Paul Baerman. "When we had C-rations, the P-38 was your access to food; that made it the hierarchy of needs," Baerman said. "Then soldiers discovered it was an extremely simple, lightweight, multipurpose tool. I think in warfare, the simpler something is and the easier access it has, the more you're going to use it. The P-38 had all of those things going for it."

The tool acquired its name from the 38 punctures required to open a C-ration can, and from the boast that it performed with the speed of the World War II P-38 fighter plane.

"Soldiers just took to the P-38 naturally," said World War II veteran John Bandola. "It was our means for eating 90 percent of the time, but we also used it for cleaning boots and fingernails, as a screwdriver, you name it. We all carried it on our dog tags or key rings." When Bandola attached his first and only P-38 to his key ring a half century ago, it accompanied him to Anzio, Salerno and through northern Italy. It was with him when World War II ended, and it's with him now. "This P-38 is a symbol of my life then," said Bandola. "The Army, the training, my fellow soldiers, all the times we shared during a world war."

Sgt. Ted Paquet, swing shift supervisor in the Fort Monmouth Provost Marshal's Office, was a 17-year-old seaman serving aboard the amphibious assault ship USS New Orleans during the Vietnam war when he got his first P-38. The ship's mission was to transport Marines off the coast of Da Nang.

On occasional evenings, Marines gathered near Paquet's duty position on the fantail for simple pleasures like "Cokes, cigarettes, conversation and C-rations." It was during one of these nightly sessions that Paquet came in contact with the P-38, or "John Wayne" as it's referred to in the Navy.

Paquet still carries his P-38, and he still finds it useful. While driving with his older brother, Paul, their car's carburettor began to have problems. "There were no tools in the car and, almost simultaneously, both of us reached for P-38s attached to our key rings," Paquet said with a grin. "We used my P-38 to adjust the flow valve, the car worked perfectly, and we went on our merry way."

Paquet's P-38 is in a special box with his dog tags, a .50-caliber round from the ship he served on, his Vietnam Service Medal, South Vietnamese money and a surrender leaflet from Operation Desert Storm provided by a nephew. "It will probably be on my dresser until the day I die," Paquet said.

The feelings veterans have for the P-38 aren't hard to understand, according to 1st Sgt. Steve Wilson of the Chaplain Centre and School at Fort Monmouth. "When you hang on to something for 26 years," he said, "it's very hard to give it up. That's why people keep their P-38 just like they do their dog tags.... It means a lot. It's become part of you. You remember field problems, jumping at 3 a.m. and moving out. A P-38 has you reliving all the adventures that came with soldiering in the armed forces. Yes, the P-38 opened cans, but it did much more. Any soldier will tell you that."


Sempers,

Roger

[top1371]

Here is a Combat Engineer C-Rat Trick:

We used to collect all the peanut butter from the grunts, because peanut butter was known to clog up your system. Well, we didnt eat it, we cooked with it. Here is what you do:

-Take the cracker can and cut it half way around on top and bottom, so you can crush it in like a sterno stove. Imagine that you are going to put something on it like a canteen cup and the fuel under it.

-Open the peanut butter and squish the cardboard from the cracker can into the peanut butter. Notice the oil of the peanut butter is seperated from the peanut butter.

-Squirt 'bug juice' - the old issued insect repelent into the peanut butter.

-Light the peanut butter put it under the stove.

You can boil water or cook any C-Rat on this little stove.

Once the grunts learned our trick they quit giving us their peanut butter

Semper Fi,

Top

[thedrifter]

and the story continues........

Who wants my ham and lima beans ...... LOL.........



Posted on Wed, Apr. 09, 2003

Tabasco travels with the troops
By STEPHANIE SHAPIRO
c 2003 The Baltimore Sun

Along with goggles and gas masks, U.S. soldiers in Iraq are carrying another item into battle -- minibottles of Tabasco sauce, packed in their food rations.

The fiery pepper sauce, produced since 1868 by the McIlhenny Co. on Avery Island in Louisiana, has spiced up military meals for more than a century.

"One of my distant cousins sent a case of Tabasco to Ulysses S. Grant when he was president," says Paul McIlhenny, company president. That still counts, because Grant was a Civil War general, he says.

A great uncle who served with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders "made sure he had a bottle of Tabasco at San Juan Hill," McIlhenny says.

Presumably, "thoughtful parents" during World War I and II and the Korean War shipped the condiment, named after a coastal region in Mexico, to their sons, McIlhenny says.

In a marketing stroke of genius, the company kicked up its efforts during the war in Vietnam. The armed forces stationed there received thousands of copies of the Charley Ration Cookbook with recipes for jazzing up C rations with Tabasco sauce, wrapped around bottles of the sauce in waterproof canisters.

During two tours of Vietnam in the late 1960s, as an infantry officer and an adviser with the military assistance command, George Creighton of Bowie doesn't remember getting the sauce from McIlhenny. But it did come in packages from his wife.

"The rations get boring and you just need something to liven them up and Tabasco does that," says Creighton, 65. He'd use it to tweak his bland beef and peas and spaghetti. On steak, it also "worked very well."

Sometimes, the troops would mix up their C rations and water-buffalo meat "like a mulligan stew with rice and put in Tabasco sauce and add flavor to the whole mix," says Creighton, an active member of state and national veterans legislative affairs committees.

By the time Operation Desert Storm ended in 1991, Tabasco sauce had become a staple in the Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Today troops stationed around the world receive a 1/8-ounce bottle of the incendiary sauce, made simply of peppers, vinegar and salt, with each MRE.

The tiny bottles are filled with sauce shipped from Avery Island to a Brooklyn, N.Y., packer. From there, the bottles go to facilities around the country where MRE components, from towelettes and burritos to matches and M&Ms, are assembled into MRE packets. The packer is "producing over a million minibottles a week," according to McIlhenny.

By request, his company will also provide troops with the newly republished MRE cookbook, more of a morale booster than a literal guide, the company president says.

E-mails are flowing in from troops involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan to the company, whose product line includes marinades, sauces, pepper jellies and souvenirs with logos. They're demanding McIlhenny's "chipotle" and garlic-pepper sauces as well as its standard sauce. With their military address, McIlhenny will send it free.

For the company, providing Tabasco to the troops is worth its weight in paid advertising. "It's not a large source of income; it's a nice source of income," McIlhenny says. Most of all, "It's a little touch of home in far-flung places."

And every time a Marine adds a dash of Tabasco to MRE of boneless pork or beef stew, Paul McIlhenny wins a minibattle for taste in a bottle. "We want to defend the world against bland food, wherever it may be."

Sempers,

Roger

[kubba]

Honestly I didn't think that there were that many marines here the would remember c-rats. I don't feel that old anymore.
I remember that hot sauce was a key ingredient with those second world war left overs.
And if you did'nt have you john wayne you were in deep dodo.
Semper FI
stan

[Barrio_rat]

Oh, yer old... but I remember C-Rats too... I saw 'em in a museum.

pfwahahahahahahahahahahaha...

Actually, MRE's had just come in as I went in... but we were still issued P-38's or, as we called 'em, John Waynes.

[kubba]

Barrio_rat
The best part of the c-rats was, now if you were lucky. were the wonderful stale crackers you got with them. Little tins of peanut butter and jelly you would save. Some guys actually got some good tasting candy.
Semper FI
stan

[Devildogg4ever]

Always like eating anything from C-rats as long as it was mixed with "Texas Pete" and "Oodles Of Noodles"! Does anyone remember how many holes there are in a C-rat cracker?