Thinking ahead

One of the most difficult things to do on a boat is to deal with meal planning. Unless you live on a dock and have a car, you can rarely dash to the store for some forgotten ingredient. The other issue is the lack of ability to keep leftovers fresh for any length of time, since refrigeration is usually inefficient at best.

One way to help with this challenge is to buy meals that you can double up on by changing or adding a very few ingredients. As an example, last night we had cheese tortellini with a red sauce, French bread, and a salad. I made twice the tortellini that we could eat, and put the rest in the fridge. This afternoon I took the rest of the tortellini and added chopped red pepper, red onion, chopped cucumber, julienned carrots, and grated Parmesan. I made a simple shake together vinaigrette with olive oil, vinegar, garlic salt, oregano, and lemon pepper and tossed it into the tortellini. I served it with leftover bread and a few slices of red pear. I didn't have to heat up the galley twice to prepare two meals and I had no leftovers.

Some other ways to double up on a meal:

Pork chops the first night with rice, pork fried rice with the leftovers.

Meatloaf the first night, cold meatloaf sandwiches the second.

Grilled chicken the first night, greens with thinly sliced cold chicken, mandarin oranges, toasted almonds, and balsamic vinaigrette the next.

Ham, grilled pineapple, and broccoli the first night, cheese omelets with diced ham and chopped broccoli the next.

Fried chicken tenders the first night, greens with diced fried chicken, cheddar chunks, red pepper chunks, and tomatoes the next day.

Grilled fish fillets with oven roasted red new potatoes and corn the first night, fish corn chowder with the leftover potatoes and corn and add onion and celery and cream the next.

Tacos the first night, then chili with the leftover taco meat as the base- add beans and canned tomatoes. Or use the taco meat for the base for sloppy joes. Doctor with barbecue sauce and spoon on crusty rolls.

Fish tenders and tossed salad the first night, fish tacos with the leftovers.

Roast chicken, baked potatoes and corn on the cob the first night, chicken corn chowder with the cold baked potatoes diced in and the corn and added cream the next.

Roast chicken or baked ham the first night, a chef salad the second.

I could go on and on with this, but if you have your favorites please comment below!

Colors

"I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature. "

Paul Cezanne 

One of the most wretched things that has happened to food in this country is the stripping of its natural colors to replace them with artificial hues that simply do not exist in nature.  For instance, wasabi. Wasabi is a root that is similar to horseradish. So much so, that what you buy as wasabi paste in most cases is really horseradish flavored with mustard and colored with bright green food coloring. And I do mean bright. When my husband ordered some tuna seared in sesame seeds at a restaurant a few weeks ago, it came with a scoop of "wasabi paste" which was the most flourescent thing I've ever seen on a plate intended for human consumption. Why, I asked myself, would you want to mess with nature's unbelievable colors for something that looked frighteningly like nuclear waste??

With this in mind, here is what's on the menu tonight: chef salads with the bounty of nature's colors available this fall.

Start out with a layer of spring mix greens, or my favorite, chopped romaine. On top of that, layer some thinly sliced cucumbers, sliced baby carrots, sliced or chunked red, yellow or orange bell peppers, and cherry or grape tomatoes if you want. You can stop here for an awesome salad, or you can add the meat ingredients for your chef salad.

I added sliced smoked ham slivers, sliced and slivered roast chicken breast, hard boiled egg slices, cheddar cheese, and topped it off with some drizzled ranch dressing. Add a side of homemade Vienna loaves and some of the best organic strawberries we've had this year and you have a whole meal with very nearly every color in the spectrum. 

I have heard that if you want to eat healthy, just eat every color of the rainbow every day. I don't know if that's true, but it would make you happier, I'm sure.

This little piggy went to market...

One of the benefits of cruising is the proximity to open air markets. Wherever there is a harbor there seems to be a farmer's market. This Saturday in Oriental, NC I had the opportunity to go to the farmer's market down by the free docks. When most markets are closing due to the cold fall weather, this one is still going, although slightly scaled down.

This was my bag of vegetables and fruit that I bought for $9, all of it locally grown and most of it picked that morning. The honey was local honey and I was able to have a very interesting discussion with the beekeeper. I asked him whether he was having any difficulty with the illness that is plaguing other beekeepers and has reduced the bee population by 40% this past year. He said that his 11 hives were all doing very well and that the reason so many bees were dying was that the commercial bee companies are packing millions of bees into one hive area. If one bee gets sick, they all get sick. His 11 local hives are spread out over the area and he is not having this issue.

I was also able to pick up a bag of Tim's favorite Ethiopian coffee from Nahala Roasting Company. What a treat! Not only does it taste incredible, but it is flavoring the whole boat interior with the aroma.

I'll be looking to make some butternut squash soup, stuffed acorn squash, flat apple pie, and maybe a stuffed green pepper. I love fall harvest time, especially when I get to shop next to boats.

On the menu for today

Cruising can be overwhelming, and the last thing you might feel like doing at the end of a long day sailing (or motoring the ICW like today), is to fix a good meal. With a little planning and preparation, you can have good, hot meal on the table. Tonight we had chicken and dumplings and poached pears with cream cheese and candied walnuts. Sound hard?  Not so. The chicken was cooked in the pressure cooker in 7 minutes with vegetables included, and the dumplings are a quick mix and drop on the boiling stew and steam for 10 minutes. The "poached" pears? Canned pear halves with a dollop of cream cheese and topped with candied walnuts. Candied nuts are the easiest thing in the world to make and add a lot of panache to any side or dessert. Just melt a tablespoon of butter in a skillet, add a spoon full of brown sugar, a 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and a drizzle of honey. Stir in a cup of any nuts and stir constantly on low heat until crisp and fragrant. Cool and chop or use whole. The dumpling recipe will be forthcoming but I'm just about out of laptop batteries so it will have to wait!

Never-ending green onion

I found this post (used with consent) over on Leave Happier, a  non-cruising blog I enjoy from time to time.  I love the idea for cruisers who seem to end up lacking vegetables frequently, but I'm not sure what kind of container would be safe and useful on a boat.  Any ideas anyone?


                                                                                                                                                                

Have you seen the green onion trick floating around Pinterest? I think (although I can’t be 100% sure because Pinterest is Pinterest) that it was originally pinned from this post on Homemade Serenity.
I have never had luck with growing herbs in the kitchen window, but this only involved tossing onion roots, onion roots that I would otherwise throw away, into a glass of water. Of course I was going to try it.
And it totally worked.

The tall ones back there? I first cut their original tops off and put them in water about a week ago. The others have been added in as they get used. Do I go through an abnormal amount of green onions?

They’re technically not never-ending; Homemade Serenity says you can probably get 7 – 15 clippings from them if you take care of them (empty and replace the water, rinsing the roots, every day or two). But buying green onions seven to fifteen times less often, and having a nice little burst of vibrant green on my kitchen windowsill, seems like an excellent deal to me.Thank you, Pinterest, for being useful this week.

In search of Real Food

I spent a few days last week with my daughter and my 3-year old grandson in Iowa, the heart of the corn industry in this country, the place where you can drive for a hundred miles in the summer and not see anything but the two rows of corn on either side of you, so tall that the plants block out any view you might have of the flat terrain.  The irony in this situation is that they live in the middle of one of the most plentiful food production locations in the whole country and my grandson can't eat any of it.  Not a bite. Why?  Because he suffers from food allergies to nearly every common allergen - corn, wheat, gluten, dairy, preservatives, you name it.  He was first diagnosed because he quit growing, moving from the 95th percentile in height and weight to the 10th percentile in just a couple months, and began displaying a variety of splotchy rashes all over him as well as a mouthful of disintegrating teeth.  The food he was eating was no longer nourishing him, it was quite literally starving him.  Organic, pesticide-free, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, additive-free food he can eat is available - at 2 stores in the whole of Iowa City - at the cost of a mortgage payment each month, difficult at best for two graduate students trying to live on a stipend. The high cost is due to the fact that there are no organic foods growing there in the middle of GMO land, all of it has to be shipped in from distant locales.

I told her they need to go cruising.

One of the greatest advantages to going cruising, especially on a tight budget as we will be, is that you tend to cook a lot and eat out very little.  This is the first step to eating Real Food.  Another advantage is that you tend to buy local, using the farmer's markets and fruit stands that are accessible to the boat via foot or bicycle.  Eating organic foods is a lot easier when you can buy them at less than a month's wages at a local market.

Maybe one of the most overlooked advantages is that you tend to carefully watch portions, since refrigeration space is limited and not very reliable and the idea of throwing good food away just doesn't fit in a cruising budget.

On the drive back home from Iowa City to Saint Louis I was passing the time listening to NPR.  They had an interesting interview about the idea of regulating sugar in this country (something that will never happen) and the doctor they were interviewing made the statement, "Eat . Real . Food" as part of his attempt to persuade people to move away from the highly processed foods that are wrecking our livers.  After spending the week trying to find food to cook for my grandson and listening to stories from other friends of my children who are dealing with the same food allergies in their children, this story served only to emphasize  our need to move toward a more healthful and whole way of living.  What better way to do it than to go cruising.

See you out there...