Is what you get in a nosebag these days then, can’t believe they still make bloody panda pop
Sugarboat
June 7, 2013 10:03 am
Reminds me when in RFA Resource of the “17 oar oggies” we used to get from the The Clarence pub in Guz a long long time ago.
Grim901
June 7, 2013 1:10 pm
Oh god why would you post something designed to give flashbacks of ‘horror bags’. Never got panda pops though, we’d normally get water, and if we were lucky, a kitkat. Its a strange world when you get used to eating still frozen sausage rolls *shudder*.
Worst of all though is when the veggies get served up cheese and onion pasty and chips whilst the normal people tuck into whatever fresh hell is coming out the Norwegian.
I remember the RAF catering officer having to do a radio falklands interview to explain why she had decided to take the choccy bar “taxi” out of the horror bags! nearly a mutiny
How about the sandwiches, rubber bread a cling film wrap. I remember when they upgraded to those plastic triangular boxes, progress
mike
June 7, 2013 5:02 pm
haha! oh yes x) more like horror boxes now XP
Grim; ” Its a strange world when you get used to eating still frozen sausage rolls *shudder*. ”
Amen to that!
A little different; I remember when ration packs had that Belgian chocolate in the white and red wrapper; lovely stuff! Today (or since the last time I had one) they have a bar of Yorkie with “its not for civvies!” on the side, not quite as good.
x
June 7, 2013 5:19 pm
The tentacles of the Wright’s Pie empire reach further than I thought….
Red Trousers
June 7, 2013 5:27 pm
For some reason when going for a day on the ranges, it is traditional to collect haverbags from the cookhouse at about 4 in the morning. The intention is that it is your lunch, but in another tradition, everyone has eaten them before 4.30 in the morning on the 4 tonner on the way to the ranges, so you don’t have to carry it about. Much simpler that way.
Alternatively, sometimes the cooks pulled out their fingers and we had range stew. Nearly 2/3rds would refuse it, as it invariably looked ghastly. Leaving more for the rest of us.
There is a Kevin Loadmaster somewhere out there who still wants to murder me, after half the squadron and I got onto a Herc for an internal shuffle from A to B in Gulf 1. We spotted that a brand new cargo net was holding about 200 white boxes, which looked interesting. I cut the net a bit to get one out, and it was an RAF haverbag of unparalleled luxury. So I cut open the rest of the net and we shared them all out. They were not meant to be for us, and there was later a big complaint to the QM, but he sent back a signal telling them that we should have been fed, and to poke off.
Brian Black
June 7, 2013 5:35 pm
It’s this kind of extravagant dining that was responsible for the £38bn black hole.
topman
June 7, 2013 5:53 pm
God awful things. I remember one lot of sausage rolls in a fridge in Basra there for those waiting to get on the herc some time in roundabout July. Not quite sure how the army had managed it, but they managed to freeze the lot of them in the fridge . a good effort, somehow they managed to make terrible food even worse.
I tell you what were good, if anyone passed through Mirandab (was it in the UAE or something) on the HERRICK air-bridge: in the waiting area were white boxes with bloody lovely samosa’s and tomato sauce sachets and a sort of bread pocket with something nice in it. They were good.
2x best meals I have ever had in my life were in Afghanistan. The first was about 6 weeks after getting in the FOB and beyond 3x small meals from a 10 man ration pack there was nothing much else going on and I was starving (to the point where I actually savoured and dragged out a pack of biscuits brown I found for a week by eating one a day) and then we had our first IRG from the Danish battalion and we had steak night, proper massive fillet steaks cooked medium rare with racks of ribs in BBQ sauce. I had two steaks and 2 racks of ribs and was a very happy man.
The other one was, believe it or not from a rat pack on a chilly morning, the strawberry porridge. Oh-Em-Gee. Glorious stuff. I’ve tried getting it here but I can’t find it. 650 calories a pop but its amazing stuff with a brew from half a plastic bottle (slightly warped from pouring boiling water in it from your random rusty Afghan kettle).
ArmChairCivvy
June 7, 2013 8:07 pm
Phil is clearly looking for my recipe of apricot porridge, to survive the civvy life and die happy:394 kcal from 215 g carried, and needs 5-8 dl water. Out of that 1 dl needs to be safe and neutral cold water to reconstitute the dried food (the difficult bit in Afghan?)
Just joking, and google translate would probably not manage the ins and outs of this properly, so no point posting the link
Grim901
June 7, 2013 8:08 pm
@Mike: Those chocolate bars were top notch, in fact those ration packs in general were a lot nicer than the new ones they brought in (full of fecking mixed nuts as a snack and fruit pouches that gave you on the spot diabetes and sugar shakes). The Yorkies seemed to disappear quickly, certainly weren’t in one of the newest ration pack incarnations.
@Red: Range Stew was gourmet compared to horror bags generally! Especially for my Irish mate who had a stereotypical and unhealthy obsession with the potatoes that would float amongst the generic mincey junk.
The multi-climate rations binned chocolate completely. And Biscuits Brown – I’d have murdered for something savoury at one point. Mixed bloody nuts and ginger stem biscuits – not great.
Red Trousers
June 7, 2013 8:35 pm
“Generic mincey junk” with floating potatoes. That is no way to refer to the Queen’s Colour Squadron.
I suspect most of the meat I ate in Germany over 20 years of either being a child whose mother got the meat from the NAAFI, or a soldier being fed for some unlikely small sum of money per day (£1.85, or something), was horse. No real complaints, but it probably was given all that we now know.
@ Phil,
your tale trumps mine. We had a new and clueless Trooper who eventually got sacked enough times to end up as the junior dogsbody in the QM’s department. He managed to arrange the rat packs for a 4 week exercise so that A Squadron had Menu A, B Squadron Menu B, etc. Thought he was doing the right thing. God that was dull eating, until enough complaints filtered up to the QM that he asked the Colonel for a 6 hour halt while he got the SQMS’s to RV somewhere and cross-load the stuff so we had some variety.
All Politicians are The same
June 7, 2013 8:50 pm
Last time I had to actually get dust on my boots the septics were in charge of the food :)
Grim901
June 7, 2013 9:10 pm
@Phil: The Multi-climate rations! Those horrible bastards. They were so bad we’d go looking for the older ones in stores even if they were out of date. Who thought it was a good idea to make the only real snacks multiple bags of nuts every day!
Mike Edwards
June 8, 2013 8:13 am
I used to hate those “Grab Bags”, weren’t worthy of anything, had the nutritional value of manky cardboard. ****ing SODEXO!
Is what you get in a nosebag these days then, can’t believe they still make bloody panda pop
Reminds me when in RFA Resource of the “17 oar oggies” we used to get from the The Clarence pub in Guz a long long time ago.
Oh god why would you post something designed to give flashbacks of ‘horror bags’. Never got panda pops though, we’d normally get water, and if we were lucky, a kitkat. Its a strange world when you get used to eating still frozen sausage rolls *shudder*.
Worst of all though is when the veggies get served up cheese and onion pasty and chips whilst the normal people tuck into whatever fresh hell is coming out the Norwegian.
I remember the RAF catering officer having to do a radio falklands interview to explain why she had decided to take the choccy bar “taxi” out of the horror bags! nearly a mutiny
I was aiming for horrified flashbacks.
Pink meat sausage roll anyone?
And I forgot the little packet of 3 custard creams or bourbans if you were lucky – powdered digestive if you weren’t.
How about the sandwiches, rubber bread a cling film wrap. I remember when they upgraded to those plastic triangular boxes, progress
haha! oh yes x) more like horror boxes now XP
Grim; ” Its a strange world when you get used to eating still frozen sausage rolls *shudder*. ”
Amen to that!
A little different; I remember when ration packs had that Belgian chocolate in the white and red wrapper; lovely stuff! Today (or since the last time I had one) they have a bar of Yorkie with “its not for civvies!” on the side, not quite as good.
The tentacles of the Wright’s Pie empire reach further than I thought….
For some reason when going for a day on the ranges, it is traditional to collect haverbags from the cookhouse at about 4 in the morning. The intention is that it is your lunch, but in another tradition, everyone has eaten them before 4.30 in the morning on the 4 tonner on the way to the ranges, so you don’t have to carry it about. Much simpler that way.
Alternatively, sometimes the cooks pulled out their fingers and we had range stew. Nearly 2/3rds would refuse it, as it invariably looked ghastly. Leaving more for the rest of us.
There is a Kevin Loadmaster somewhere out there who still wants to murder me, after half the squadron and I got onto a Herc for an internal shuffle from A to B in Gulf 1. We spotted that a brand new cargo net was holding about 200 white boxes, which looked interesting. I cut the net a bit to get one out, and it was an RAF haverbag of unparalleled luxury. So I cut open the rest of the net and we shared them all out. They were not meant to be for us, and there was later a big complaint to the QM, but he sent back a signal telling them that we should have been fed, and to poke off.
It’s this kind of extravagant dining that was responsible for the £38bn black hole.
God awful things. I remember one lot of sausage rolls in a fridge in Basra there for those waiting to get on the herc some time in roundabout July. Not quite sure how the army had managed it, but they managed to freeze the lot of them in the fridge . a good effort, somehow they managed to make terrible food even worse.
I tell you what were good, if anyone passed through Mirandab (was it in the UAE or something) on the HERRICK air-bridge: in the waiting area were white boxes with bloody lovely samosa’s and tomato sauce sachets and a sort of bread pocket with something nice in it. They were good.
2x best meals I have ever had in my life were in Afghanistan. The first was about 6 weeks after getting in the FOB and beyond 3x small meals from a 10 man ration pack there was nothing much else going on and I was starving (to the point where I actually savoured and dragged out a pack of biscuits brown I found for a week by eating one a day) and then we had our first IRG from the Danish battalion and we had steak night, proper massive fillet steaks cooked medium rare with racks of ribs in BBQ sauce. I had two steaks and 2 racks of ribs and was a very happy man.
The other one was, believe it or not from a rat pack on a chilly morning, the strawberry porridge. Oh-Em-Gee. Glorious stuff. I’ve tried getting it here but I can’t find it. 650 calories a pop but its amazing stuff with a brew from half a plastic bottle (slightly warped from pouring boiling water in it from your random rusty Afghan kettle).
Phil is clearly looking for my recipe of apricot porridge, to survive the civvy life and die happy:394 kcal from 215 g carried, and needs 5-8 dl water. Out of that 1 dl needs to be safe and neutral cold water to reconstitute the dried food (the difficult bit in Afghan?)
Just joking, and google translate would probably not manage the ins and outs of this properly, so no point posting the link
@Mike: Those chocolate bars were top notch, in fact those ration packs in general were a lot nicer than the new ones they brought in (full of fecking mixed nuts as a snack and fruit pouches that gave you on the spot diabetes and sugar shakes). The Yorkies seemed to disappear quickly, certainly weren’t in one of the newest ration pack incarnations.
@Red: Range Stew was gourmet compared to horror bags generally! Especially for my Irish mate who had a stereotypical and unhealthy obsession with the potatoes that would float amongst the generic mincey junk.
@Mike & Grim
The multi-climate rations binned chocolate completely. And Biscuits Brown – I’d have murdered for something savoury at one point. Mixed bloody nuts and ginger stem biscuits – not great.
“Generic mincey junk” with floating potatoes. That is no way to refer to the Queen’s Colour Squadron.
I suspect most of the meat I ate in Germany over 20 years of either being a child whose mother got the meat from the NAAFI, or a soldier being fed for some unlikely small sum of money per day (£1.85, or something), was horse. No real complaints, but it probably was given all that we now know.
@ Phil,
your tale trumps mine. We had a new and clueless Trooper who eventually got sacked enough times to end up as the junior dogsbody in the QM’s department. He managed to arrange the rat packs for a 4 week exercise so that A Squadron had Menu A, B Squadron Menu B, etc. Thought he was doing the right thing. God that was dull eating, until enough complaints filtered up to the QM that he asked the Colonel for a 6 hour halt while he got the SQMS’s to RV somewhere and cross-load the stuff so we had some variety.
Last time I had to actually get dust on my boots the septics were in charge of the food :)
@Phil: The Multi-climate rations! Those horrible bastards. They were so bad we’d go looking for the older ones in stores even if they were out of date. Who thought it was a good idea to make the only real snacks multiple bags of nuts every day!
I used to hate those “Grab Bags”, weren’t worthy of anything, had the nutritional value of manky cardboard. ****ing SODEXO!