This week's cooking column is guest-written by First Mate Buffy.
As the Cap'n mentioned, this week's trip is a trial visit for me to test my boat-living skills. I am considering spending a good part of the summer living aboard. One of the few reservations I have left about this is the cooking-and-eating situation.
Over the past few months, I've been trying to watch what I eat for health reasons. I've forsaken take-out and prepared foods almost entirely, and have been doing more cooking at home with fresh vegetables and meats. I've been eating pretty well and learning new recipes. This week on the boat has thrown me off the wagon almost completely. I told Scott that I wasn't sure whether I was more opposed to the Krill or the ramen in the Krill and Ramen meal.
Here's the challenge. Without refrigeration, most of our food is coming from cans and boxes. Add the humidity, and even onions don't last long. And our cooking appliances are one propane grill and two propane burners, and it's tough to get the heat very high on them. No working oven. A very limited amount of space = limited supply of staples also.
These have been our top meals this week:
Spaghetti with sauce from a jar, with roasted red peppers (also from a jar) - a pic of this was on a previous post.
Cheddar sausages with onions and peppers
Steamed clams (picked up from a seafood shack within kayaking distance from our anchorage today)
Scott's famous egg sandwich
Grilled brats with a side salad of black beans, canned tomatoes and avocado.
It hasn't been too bad and I think it will be better this summer. We're going to try to get Scott a 12-volt fridge (an early birthday present) while I have the rental car tomorrow, which will help somewhat. I think I also need to do a little more research on stove top meals, good recipes using non-perishable ingredients, and figuring out a stretch of menus that use the same (short) list of ingredients. If anyone has a reference for a good "sailboat" cookbook, let me know.
Once I get home, I'm not eating cold cuts with processed cheese on white bread again for a very long time.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Cooking with Cap'n Scott, Guest Edition
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
We're having shrimp for dinner tonight. I picked them up this morning along with the clams at a seafood shack just off our bow.
We cut up some of the shrimp and tried to do some fishing with them as bait. We almost immediately caught three puffer fish. I think they are really inedible and probably poisonous, so we gave up on the fishing.
Oh, and the avocado, black bean and tomato salad was excellent. I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. I had bought an avocado the day Buffy arrived. She found the cans of black beans and diced tomatoes in my larder.
It’s fun to read Amy’s guest postings and I love seeing the photos. Your galley looks nice - very clean and shipshape! Even the hot dog looks like it’s coming out of a food ad in your photo.
Yeah – trying to manage food w/o a fridge is a challenge if you like fresh things. Personally I’m a relatively low-brow eater and easily satisfied with extremely simple (euphemism for crummy) meals – which Scott appears to favor as well – at least when he’s in solo mode (i.e. – his classic egg w/ramen breakfast).
There have been many, many books written about how to best to work within all the limitations a small vessel imparts to food/diet. One interesting tid-bit that I picked up somewhere is that eggs needn’t be refrigerated and will last many weeks if coated with Vaseline. They’d also do better if stowed one way up – but I can’t remember whether it was the pointy or rounded end. ?
You may be able to run across some of these books at used book stores, etc. Hey, maybe someone has put it all up on the net. Anyway, it’s been done enough that there are lots of really good ideas out there somewhere.
Unfortunately the 12V refrigerator is probably unworkable due to the electrical draw unless you’re connected to shore power. Even the smallest of them have compressors that pull around 4.5 amps when in the cooling phase and since they need to do this about half the time it works out to ~ 50 amp hours/day. You have to have enough battery reserve to cover this between recharges which typically means a deep cycle battery bank of several hundred amp hours – to avoid depletion below 85% of capacity. If not you’ll put too much demand on your present solo deep cycle battery and it’ll soon be worn out. Alternatively, you can recharge more frequently but then you’re locked in to an unpleasant amount of generator usage.
In my boat I initially had a nice small Coleman 120/12V portable combo unit (that I still have in storage). It would be OK on the batteries for a couple of days away from the marina – especially if I was doing any amount of recharging via the alternator on my main engine. Something like this would be great for your purposes so long as you were plugged in to shore power most of the time.
Later I installed a permanent 12V unit, but by that time I also had solar panels, a wind generator and plenty of batteries. This assemblage allowed for complete electrical independence at anchor without any gas/diesel charging – a great solution – but $.
Have I got a recipe for you. 5-can bean soup.
1 can chicken broth
1 can fat free refried beans
1 can rotel tomatoes with chiles, drained
1 can kidney beans, drained
1 can black beans, drained
1 onion, chopped
1 garlic clove
Saute onion and garlic in a bit of oil. Add a dash of any type of tex-mex spice you have on hand, or not (chili powder, cumin, oregano, etc). Add cans of everything, cook about 20-30 minutes, or until soup thickens up. I guarantee you'll like this one.
maybe we should try some macrobiotic food on Saturday night to help you with your detox.
Ross - Thanks for all the info! I plan to start looking for those cookbooks, in print and online. Scott has a response about the 12V fridge (something about his electrical system is different), but I'll let him post that!
Rachel - I remember that soup - so good! I have the recipe card for it at home, and I'm planning on putting it in my boat box.
Kristen - I wouldn't force such a thing on you and Matt. Detox will have to wait until next week.
Hey Ross,
The "fridge" we're going to pick up today is something like this.
It doesn't have a compressor or refrigerant. The cooling element is a solid state element called a peltier device. I have a peltier device which I bought at radio shack or somewhere, years ago. If I hook it up to a small solar panel I can feel one side of it cool and the other heat up.
Theoretically, the thermoelectric fridge should be able to run with varying voltage and amperage. I'll see if I can get a larger solar panel and dedicate it to the fridge. I'll let you know how this works out.
But of course, the fridge is mainly a concession to the better half. I'm quite satisfied with warm beer and bread. Aside from the canned and dried foods aboard, I usually have eggs, processed cheese and meat from which I make sandwiches. I run through the "fresh" stuff within a week, and haven't had a problem with spoilage of eggs or other items.
Oh, and I picked up another deep cycle battery. I now have two. It's made a huge difference. I have something like 180 amp/hours between the two batteries.
With the battery bank, Buffy has been able to beat me soundly in Playstation's Tiger Woods Golf a couple times. And she's been able to watch American Idol and some game shows at anchor.
Take a look at this. Maybe a little more extreme than you want, but some good ideas.
http://cruisenews.net/recipes/index.php
Thanks Anon, those recipes are probably a little more extreme than the trouble I would go to. But maybe Amy would be interested in them. If she cooked some stuff like that, I wouldn't turn my nose up at it. I generally eat what's put in front of me without complaint. Sometimes, I even end up liking it.
Post a Comment