Photo By Spc. Nathan Goodall | Soldiers with A Battery, 1st Battalion, 84th Field Artillery Regiment, 170th Infantry...... read more read more
COMBAT OUTPOST QEYSAR, Afghanistan – U.S. Army cooks are required to prepare food that keeps soldiers alive and healthy. They aren’t required to make it taste good, but for a group of cooks deployed in northwestern Afghanistan taste matters.
Food service specialists with A Battery, 1st Battalion, 84th Field Artillery Regiment, 170th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, constantly strive to make excellent tasting meals here since they deployed in February.
At small outposts in Afghanistan, food typically comes in few forms. Main meals are usually made from unitized group ration modules, boxed sets that include a meat dish, a starch and a vegetable in amounts to serve 50 people.
While the modules fulfill meal requirements, they only come in 12 flavors, said Spc. Nicholas A. Carrell, an Arvada, Colo., native, now a food service specialist with A Battery.
“If you just cycle through those for the whole deployment, it gets kind of depressing,” Carrell said.
That’s why the food service soldiers do everything they can to make meals interesting, said Spc. William J. Vanderwagen, a Surprise, Ariz., native, now a food service specialist with A Battery.
“I don’t want to be digging into my plate and thinking, ‘This is the food we get in Afghanistan,’ I want to think ‘This is some good food,’” Vanderwagen said.
The cooks here make original dishes by modifying modules into something that comes off as less prepackaged and more homecooked, Vanderwagen said.
Some modules, like General Tso’s chicken, aren’t bad cooked right out of the box, Vanderwagen said.
However, eating General Tso’s chicken every week for a year doesn’t offer much variety. Through imagination and experimentation, the cooks came up with a way to make the dish into something different, Vanderwagen said.
By adding scratch ingredients like different spices and orange juice, the cooks were able to make orange chicken sauce from the General Tso’s chicken module to create a whole new flavor for soldiers at the outpost.
A lot of trial and error goes on in the kitchen. The food service specialists constantly make small test batches of new dishes for soldiers to try, Vanderwagen said.
“It’s our test fire,” Carrell said. “If people like it, we’ll pick out a night where we make it as part of an entire meal.”
A new test fire conducted by the cooks yielded their improvised version of crab rangoon.
“We took some artificial crab meat, chopped it up and diced it real fine and mixed it together with packets of cream cheese, folded the contents inside a taco shell and held it with two pairs of tongs in the fryer,” Vanderwagen said.
The result was a fried, flower-shaped shell filled with flavor.
Pfc. Jonathan Baker, a Nevada, Texas, native, now an M240 machine-gunner with A Battery, was one of the soldiers that tested the crab rangoon.
“It was fantastic,” Baker said. “It’s something I’d like to see them cook as part of an actual meal, I let them know that.”
Successful test fires have become regular dishes at the outpost.
For example, beer-battered fish is not something you’d find very often in Afghanistan, unless you’re at Combat Outpost Qeysar.
Through kitchen ingenuity, the cooks mixed non-alcoholic beer with pancake batter. Normal fish rations were coated in the beer batter and fried to make a meal soldiers raved about until it became part of the regular menu, Vanderwagen said.
The cooks’ extra effort doesn’t go unnoticed by the soldiers, said Spc. Zachary R. Ward, a St. George, Ga., native, now a driver with A Battery.
Putting in that extra effort is something the food service soldiers are glad to do.
“Like any soldier, I would rather not eat bad-tasting food,” Carrell said. “I love food so much that most of the time it’s enough to make me want to cook the very best I can.”
In addition to crab rangoon, A Battery’s cooks have a few more ideas they’re working on.
What started as a test fire to make omelets turned into a new tradition called “Eggs-to-Order Sundays” where soldiers can get eggs made any way they want at breakfast on Sundays.
The next big thing the cooks are working on is deep fried peanut butter cups and ice cream, Vanderwagen said.
“We’ve successfully made it on one occasion,” Vanderwagen said. “We haven’t figured out how we’re going to do it on a big scale yet, but we’ve got the basis for it down.”
| Date Taken: | 10.27.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 11.08.2011 00:45 |
| Story ID: | 79697 |
| Location: | COMBAT OUTPOST QEYSAR, AF |
| Web Views: | 114 |
| Downloads: | 2 |
This work, The cooks of Qeysar, by SPC Nathan Goodall, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
No keywords found.
