Tuesday , December 23 , 2008 MREs and a Yuletide Walk in the Valley I am on vacation this week . This Thursday is Christmas , according to most people I ' ve spoken to recently . Especially those folks at the mall who are always trying to sell stuff to me . This year , Spring and I have cut down on shopping . We ' re a bit preoccupied with the the impending arrival of a little boy . The nice doctor says that our little boy should pop out in about a month . This morning I decided to get a little exercise and hike down into the valley . It was cold . It was cold and windy and really cold . So I bundled up and wore thick gloves and a bunch of other clothes . I threw a napsack on my back . I trudged across the park through the thick snow , down the hill into the valley and over and under and around trees and undergrowth until I reached a little section of forest . I unpacked my napsack onto a wool blanket I had doubled over and laid out onto a small area of snow I had compacted with my boots . My napsack contained my Gransfors - Bruks Small Forest Axe , a kettle , an IKEA stainless steel cutlery drainer ( yes , really - you ' ll see ) , a 1 litre Nalgene bottle full of warm water , 10 feet of rope , my fire kit ( a piece of quartz , my Hudson Bay Fire Steel , a piece of fatwood , charcloth and jute string ) . For some strange reason I forgot my Mora knife ( which has never happened before , I swear ) . Good thing I ' d sharpened my axe recently . I also carried an MRE ration pack , a wool blanket and a fork / spoon thingy . I could hear the chattering of squirrels and the occasional squawk from a crow high up in the trees . There were deer tracks and squirrel tracks and rabbit tracks around . The deer tracks looked very fresh , I wondered if I had scared them off on my way through the pathways . I put some birchbark and the piece of fatwood which I had shaved up using my sharp axe and some matchstick thin pine kindling into the IKEA cutlery drainer , which I laid onto the lid of the kettle . It would make for a nice hobo stove . Using the piece of quartz , a sliver of charcloth , and my steel striker I struck a few sparks until the charcloth took an ember . I wrapped the ember in some unraveled jute twine and got a flame going in no time . I dropped the flame into the hobo stove and got the twigs burning . They flared up and I got the water boiling very quickly . Next step to get the stove up and running properly , I need to cut a large opening with a Dremel Tool ( Santa , are you listening ? ) so that I can feed the flame easily without removing the kettle or the pot from the top . Also , I need to make a proper stand , using nuts and bolts and some steel legs . Now that I had the water ready , I added some apple cider mix and sat back and relaxed with a hot drink . It warmed my hands - I had removed my mitts to get everything ready , and the cold , damp and freezing wind was turning my fingers into little painful ice cubes . Next I opened up the thick plastic bag contained the Meal Ready to Eat ( MRE ) ration pack . It contained a foil pack of Chicken Breast Strips with Chunky Style Salsa ( whatever that means ) , some bread , Cherry Jubilee , an Oatmeal cookie , some Grape Jelly , coffee / sugar / sweetener , an electrolyte powdered drink mix , salt , pepper , a heavy - duty plastic spoon , a wet wipe ( to clean up ) and a serviette . I had also brought an MRE heater pack . You just add a couple of tablespoons of water , and put the meal bag into the sack - and pop these two items into the box that the meal comes in , and wait for 15 minutes for it all to heat up . The end of the instructions reads ' Careful - contents will be hot ! ' So I set it up , leaned it up against a tree as instructed and waited . I made coffee . It was weak because I added too much water . Apparently this brand of coffee is the ' Deep Rich ' brand . Next time I ' ll bring my own . Taste rating : 2 out of 5 . The sugar helped . I waited and waited and soon my hiking hunger took over and I opened the package containing the whole wheat bread . Despite it having sat quietly in the package for several years ( along with everything else ) , I covered it in Grape Jelly and munched it on down . The bread was actually pretty good - it tasted cakey / cakish / cakesque and was moist and crumbly and filling . Taste rating : 4 out of 5 . After 15 minutes I removed the foil entree from the box and the bag . It was cool . Cooler than room temperature , but not frozen . The heater obviously had been defective . Cold chunky chicken salsa stew tastes pretty bad . But I choked it on down , adding the pepper and salt to season it . I had used my water for the drink and to activate the heater , and didn ' t have the wherewithall to boil the bag using melted snow . Taste rating : 1 out of 5 . I finished with a crumbly , sugary sweet cookie . Blech . Taste rating : 2 out of 5 . The cherry jubilee was actually really good . I wasn ' t sure if I was to eat it hot or cold , so I ate it cold and thoroughly enjoyed it . Taste rating : 5 out of 5 . I packed the unfinished hobo stove and fire kit into the kettle . I closed the lid , and put it back into my napsack . I packed the garbage into the MRE plastic sac , and into my napsack . I rolled up the blanket and stuffed it away . Then I got another fire going with the remnants of the embers from the hobo stove , by using some fluffy weed heads from the field behind the woods . I sat back and warmed myself up to the crackling of the fire . Then I made my way back past the river , through the thick snow in the woods and out of the valley again . Three hours later I got back home . It was a great morning .