On May 23, 5:29*am, whirled peas > wrote:
> Omelet wrote:
> > Sorry, but I thought this was funny as hell. ;-)
>
> > U.S. Military recipe for brownies and oatmeal cookies.
>
> > It's twenty-six pages long
>
> Taken out of context, this seems to be yet another example of military
> and government bloat. However, if genuine, this is an iron-clad
> specification for outside suppliers to sell clean, safe, wrapped
> brownies to the military for our troops. I'll bet that an unscrupulous
> supplier couldn't get melamine, say, through this document.
>
> The recipes the military cooks actually use for garrisoned troops are
> pretty boring, notable mostly for making 100 servings. Each recipe is
> only a page long. Do a Google search for H00200.pdf for the Brownies and
> H00700.pdf for the Oatmeal Cookies.

It's not obvious, because it's buried well down in the recipe, but
this is
almost certainly the recipe for the brownies that go into MREs.
They're
supposed to be shelf-stable under a wide variety of storage conditions
that would cause most people to throw the stuff away. For example,
who would expect that food sitting on a pallet in a 120 F hangar would
be fit for anything but the garbage? Three years later?

There was a piece on NPR this weekend where a reporter took the
recipe to a local bakery and made a batch. (They weren't very good
brownies, but I suspect that if you've been living on MREs for a week
they'd taste pretty good.) That may have prompted this recipe to
surface on the Web.

Cindy Hamilton