It was hard to get a bit "Masterchef"' with the 24 hour packs. But menu A (chicken curry and rice) had some potential to make quite a decent rice pudding. Oatmel blocks could me mashed, heated with milk and crunched up biscuits AB to make passable porridge. (AB stood for Allied Bakeries BTW - I always assumed it meant "Anal Blockage" due to thier effect). And the fruitcake tasted like christmas pudding when hot.
But they were still better than MRE's. Joint Ops with the Yanks usually saw them trying to swap their Meals Rejected by Ethiopians for our compo - which we were fairly reluctant to do until it was pointed out that MREs could be used to make a fairly impressive IED. What you do is take a 1.5 litre bottle of coke and empty out or drink half the contents. Then add the contents of one self heating MRE, put the top back on tightly, shake vigoursly for about 5 seconds and then deploy. Detonation time depended on the temperature of the coke. If it had come straight from the fridge, you had time to retire at leisure before the bang. But if the coke had been sitting out in the desert sun for a while, you had better be able to sprint faster than Usain Bolt!