Military marches to different recipes now

Army food.

Just one of numerous oxymorons associated with the armed forces, right?

Oh, the jokes are legion — almost as legion as members of the military. There’s MRE, which, instead of meaning “meals ready to eat” really stands for “mystery E” or “meals refusing to exit,” as the wags would have it. “Armored cow,” or canned milk. And of course, the old standby “SOS,” which … well, you know what that means.

So imagine this instead, being prepared in a tent and served in another tent, both of them in a rocky, dusty field: turkey meatballs with made-from-scratch spaghetti sauce and tricolor rotini, with Parmesan cheese for serving. Fresh steamed broccoli. Salad. Made-from-scratch vegetable soup. And Black Forest cake, complete with fresh-fruit topping.

Welcome to the 21st century Army.

And they’re proud of it, justifiably so. So proud that there’s a competition, the Phillip A. Connelly Awards Program cooking competition, field kitchen and feeding category, in which various units compete not in shooting or range-bombing but in proving their culinary prowess.

The competition began this summer, when 14 Reserve-level units, including National Guard units, competed. Four units, including the 63rd Brigade Support Battalion of the Army Reserve, made the finals. The unit is based in Sloan but the competition took place earlier this month at Nellis Air Force Base, where they undergo some of their training, including field training.

The competition is judged on 56 criteria, under categories that include food safety, use and maintenance of equipment, and support from the command staff, as well as food preparation and quality. They have a set time to prepare the meal for a minimum of 50 people, and the evaluators go through the line at different times, to ensure the food is maintained at serving temperature.

And in the words of Sgt. 1st Class Silverio Aguirre, who serves his Reserve unit in a sort of head-chef role: “I don’t think we have any competition.”

Of course, Aguirre had reason to be confident; his civilian job is sous chef at Green Valley Ranch Resort. He’s been in the Reserves for 13 years, nine of them in food service.

And Aguirre said Army food service isn’t all that different from the private sector.

“We still have to meet a budget,” he said. “A lot of the stuff stays alike — same concept, different areas. It’s still a goal to provide the best meal possible.”

Aguirre said such programs serve to improve Army meals. An upcoming fine-dining competition in Fort Lee, Va., he said, will involve such things as ice sculptures.

“It gets real fancy.”

No, they won’t be seeing ice sculptures in the dining tent anytime soon, he added. “It gives the soldiers the opportunity to showcase their skills.”

During this competition, though, the emphasis was more on the kind of food the unit serves to 500 people at its battle assembly one weekend a month.

While the Army chose the menu for the competition, the unit can use its own recipes, and the 63rd Brigade Support Battalion did.

“Do you want to make your own sauce or do you want to use Ragu?” Aguirre asked rhetorically. “We changed just about everything for this menu.”

The turkey meatballs, he said, were because of the Army’s renewed emphasis on nutrition, as was the tricolor, vegetable-based pasta.

The food was prepared in a containerized kitchen, which is a sort of tent/trailer combination, the cooking area as streamlined as you would expect from an outfit that might have to set up in mere hours. The fuel to heat the burners is diesel. They used to run on gasoline, but they were changed around 2000 because of safety concerns, and because just about everything else in the Army runs on diesel, said Chief Warrant Officer 5 Pamela Null, a food-service adviser for the U.S. Army Reserve Command, who was serving as one of the evaluators.

On a cool, windy day, it was shockingly hot in the kitchen as a large square pot of sauce simmered on the stove and salads and desserts were being prepared nearby.

“This unit has air-conditioning and heat,” Null said wryly. “The mobile kitchen trailers don’t.”

Nearby was the sanitation tent, where everything was being cleaned as soon as the kitchen staff finished with it. The reservists in the two tents had to work in concert, which led to occasional shouts across the space of “I need cold water to shock this,” “I need a ladle,” “Don’t throw that out” and, finally, “10 minutes.”

Of the 11 reservists involved in food service, only four are cooks as civilians, which Aguirre said can present some challenges.

“As a reservist, you still have a civilian life,” he said. “You don’t get the hands-on food-service action 24/7, as I do. It was more difficult, more challenging. I would never have backed off from trying to teach these guys as much as I know.”

When the meal was ready at the appointed time, the soldiers formed up in tactical formation, washed their hands and ate their meals in the dining tent — standing up. Chairs or benches were nowhere to be seen.

“In a tactical situation, they eat, get out and get back to the job,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Alan Owens of the 79th Sustainment Support Command. “They eat in 15, 20 minutes at the most.”

Owens was part of the chain of command on site to show their support for the unit — for which they also get evaluated. (“We made our points on that one,” said 1st Lt. Teresa Gonzalez, the unit’s commander.)

Like all the rest of their training, it prepares them to work on deployment, since, as Napoleon reportedly said, an Army marches on its stomachs.

They’ll learn the results of the competition sometime next month; the winning unit will be represented at a ceremony in Chicago in May.

“It’s a lot of hard work, tedious work, but it’s worth it,” Gonzalez said. “It keeps our soldiers on their toes.”

Contact reporter Heidi Knapp Rinella at Hrinella@reviewjournal.com. Find more of her stories at www.reviewjournal.com and bestoflasvegas.com. Follow her on Twitter @HKRinella.