An army marches on its stomach

In which case the newly-arrived Van Doos at Kandahar [see 2 R22eR Battle Group here] must be moving well:

Army chefs get creative for Canada's troops
Inventive cooks are getting a reputation among battlefield gourmets


ZHARI DISTRICT, AFGHANISTAN — Corporal Pascal Lavoie is sweating.

The mercury out here has long since hit 50 degrees and beneath the garage-style lighting in his stifling kitchen trailer, the crab legs he's planning to serve up are being unco-operative. Crammed into a giant Second World War-era pot, they're finally boiling and, at a length longer than his forearms, their shells have been steamed into thorny, burning spears.

“Oh yeah, we burn ourselves all the time,” Cpl. Lavoie said with a shrug, tossing some errant crab legs into a metal serving pan and pausing to show off the pale underside of his forearms, where several deep pink streaks are branded into his skin.

Corporal Pascal Lavoie wrestles with steaming crab legs destined for the dinner plates of Canadian Forces in the Zhari district of Kandahar province. (Jessica Leeder/The Globe and Mail)

Burns, though, hardly seem like much of an occupational hazard when you're cooking in a place where the boom of artillery fire is your bass and the whiz of attack helicopters your treble. It's a place without running water or measuring cups, where you can easily find yourself faced with feeding 100 more people than you planned for; a place where the force of supply choppers taking off nearby threaten to suck up your kitchen just as Dorothy's house gave way to that tornado in The Wizard of Oz – it actually happened last week to a mess tent, which was “sucked up like a Kleenex,” but no one was hurt.

All of this sounds like the backdrop for a high-stakes reality show. But it's not.

For Canada's real-life Iron Chefs, it's just a typical day at the office – and they love it...

Read on, slide-show here.

Update: Bruce Rolston's comment on this story:

...Whereas the free food at Kandahar Air Field, provided by contractors, remains truly horrible (you can always supplement it with the fast food, though, so it's not so bad), there's some real great meals awaiting if you if you get sent to one of the Canadian-manned locations away from the airfield. The promise of a break for better food in Zhari or the city has a lot to do with KAF rats always being happy to volunteer for another trip out. Of course, with the ANA naan bread was always readily available, too, which I've long loved, so I was pretty well set-up that way regardless.

I've always thought Jalalabad naan was the best.