This blog used to be about finding a way to be comfortable in the sometimes uncomfortable cruising life with the sea. After cruising five years, we found out that the focus needed to be on finding a way to live a healthy life while cruising, something we found very difficult to do. Although the original comfort food recipes are still in the sidebar (because we all need a treat once in awhile,) the new posts will all center on healthy recipes that can be prepared in a boat galley or at home.
Cruisers never seem to know what to do with those ubiquitous cans of food that they all stock up with when provisioning, as if civilization will come to an end and they will have to live off the cans for the foreseeable future. I would be guilty of that - my boat pantry is full of them, even though we come loaded with fresh food every week. So last week I decided to make some salmon patties with 2 of the cans and they turned out so good that I had to remake them this week and try to write down the recipe. I am completely guilty as charged with cooking without a recipe. So here we go - I was able to repeat the performance.
Ingredients:
2 short cans of pink salmon, or 1 tall can, bones removed.
1 egg
1/3 cup yogurt, or 1/4 cup if your salmon is very wet.
1 short stack of Ritz crackers or cracker crumbs, divided
1-1/2 tsp Jane's Crazy Mixed Up Salt
1/2 cup flour
Remaining 2 Tbl cracker crumbs
1-1/2 tsp Jerk seasoning (I used Penzeys)
1 tsp Janes Crazy Mixed Up Salt
1/4 cup oil
Directions:
Place crackers in ziplock sandwich bag. Use rolling pin (or thermos as you see here) and crush to fine crumbs, or use pre-packaged cracker crumbs. Set aside.
Place salmon in medium bowl. Remove all bones. Stir to break up into small crumbles.
Mix flour, jerk seasoning and salt on a plate. Set aside.
Heat oil in skillet on medium heat.
Reserve 2 Tbl cracker crumbs. Add remaining crumbs, egg, yogurt, and salt to salmon. Mix well. Divide into 4 portions and shape each portion into a patty.
With other hand, pat flour mixture onto outside of patty, turning and covering other side and all edges.
Place patties in hot oil and cook till golden on one side, approximately 5 minutes depending on your burner. Turn, and cook other side till golden.
Serve with whatever pasta bits you might have lurking in your pantry - you can see here we mixed macaroni and noodles because I had about 2 spoonfuls of each. Enjoy!
I grew up with this coffee cake. My mom used to make it on Saturday mornings and I have the fondest memories every time I smell the vanilla and cinnamon wafting from the oven. I have a lot of recipes that have these very same ingredients in them but I can tell you every time when it's the coffee cake in the oven. Right now it's Sunday morning on the boat. A cloudy Sunday morning after a difficult late night and it just seemed the right comfort food to have for brunch. Enjoy.
Cake Batter: 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 large eggs 1 tsp vanilla 2 cups all purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup sour cream or plain yogurt Topping: 1/2 cup packed brown sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 2 teaspoons vanilla 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
Cream the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in a large bowl. I don't have an electric mixer on board so I use a potato masher for this and it works great. Once it's mixed together I use a whisk to whip it till it's light and fluffy.
Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside.
Mix the brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and walnuts together. Set aside. Once you have the three bowls ready and your yogurt, you can begin to combine them. Mix half of the flour mixture into the egg/sugar mixture and stir well to combine. It should look like very thick batter like the picture at the left.
Add half of the sour cream and stir till combined. Don't worry if the batter looks like it's going to start separating. This is normal.
Add the remaining flour and stir well and then add the remaining sour cream and stir again. It should look like normal cake batter, only thicker.
Spread half of the batter into the greased 9 x 13 pan. It will just barely cover the pan about 1/2" thick. Take half of the topping mixture and sprinkle evenly on top of the batter. Take the remaining batter and drop by spoonfuls onto the topping mixture in the pan. Carefully spread the batter to cover the topping mixture without mixing in the topping mixture. Take remaining half of the topping mixture and sprinkle it evenly over the second batter layer. Bake at 350° for 25-35 minutes depending on your boat's oven. The top should be golden brown.
Tool Tip:
The lowly potato masher is a liveaboard / cruiser's best friend. Use it to mix heavy cookie doughs, cold butter, any vegetable including, of course, the potato. Best $2.79 you'll ever spend.
I'm a sucker for a good thin crust pizza. The problem is the "good" part of that sentence. It's pretty hard to find anything exceptional in the land of pre-fab carboard box pizzas. That was until my daughter moved in with us more than a year ago. Along with her came her subscription to Cooks Illustrated, and the first and probably my favorite recipe, the one for the pizza crust. She practiced on us over a few months, perfecting the recipe into something you can only dream about. Crispy, delicate crust with a flavor to die for. So give it a try - it's worth it I promise, but don't expect to master it in one try. It may take you a month or two of consistent attempts, but I promise your family will be grateful.
This recipe makes 3 large pizzas that will feed 4 adults and 3 very hungry kids. I generally cut it in half for the two of us and we have one largish medium one for dinner and one for lunch the next day. If you absolutely must you can substitute all-purpose flour for the bread flour, but you will not get the crispy crust. You need the high protein content of bread flour to get that crispy wonderfulness.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup warm water (105 to 115 degrees)
1 envelope (2 1/4 teaspoons) rapid-rise yeast
1-1/4cups water at room temperature
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 cups (20 ounces) bread flour , plus more for dusting work surfaces and hands
1-1/2teaspoons salt
Olive oil or nonstick cooking spray for oiling the bowl
Instructions:
Measure the warm water into a 2-cup measuring cup. Sprinkle in the yeast and let stand until the yeast dissolves and swells, about 5 minutes.
Add the room-temperature water and oil and stir to combine.
Combine the salt and half the flour in a deep bowl.
Add the liquid ingredients and use a wooden spoon to combine. Add the remaining flour, stirring until a cohesive mass forms.
Turn the dough only a lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth and elastic, 7 to 8 minutes, using as little dusting flour as possible while kneading.
Form the dough into a ball, put it in a deep oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap.Find a warm place to rise your dough. When we're at our house, I use one
of those microwave heating pads and set it next to the dough inside the
microwave. When we're on the boat I usually set it in the sun. The one
most common error new yeast bakers do is to set their dough where there
is a draft. A draft will cause the yeast not to raise.Let it rise until doubled in size, 1 1/2 to 2 hours. (Sorry about the blurry image. It is a boat, and it's on water with power boat wake.)
While the dough is rising, get your topping ingredients ready. We like bacon and pepperoni and parmesan so that's what you see here.
When you dough has nearly doubled in size, preheat your oven to 500°.
Use either a pizza stone or a few unglazed terra cotta tiles. Be sure that the tiles you get are lead-free.
Cut the dough into however many pizzas you want to make and begin to shape it.
Place the shaped dough on a square or round of parchment paper. Do not use anything else but parchment paper or you will not ever get a delicate crispy crust. Trust me on this! Place the parchment paper on a pizza paddle or an inverted cookie sheet.
Add the sauce being careful not to use too much. Add your toppings, again not using too much as this will soften the crust. Slide the parchment paper off the paddle or cookie sheet directly onto the pizza stone or tiles.
Bake at500° for 6-8 minutes, watching carefully as it will go from
perfect to burned in less than 30 seconds. Use the paddle or cookie
sheet to remove it from the oven. Enjoy!
I rarely pass on product information on a product that I haven't tried yet, but I'm entering a giveaway on Windtraveler.net for an Aeropress coffe maker and I wanted to tell you all about it because it looks fascinating! One of my biggest gripes about French press coffee makers is the mess. It's hard to get the grounds out of the press when you're done and it requires a ton of water to clean. Brittany at Windtraveler.net assures me that this press is easy to use and cleans up in a flash with very little water. I trust her, but don't you think I should win it so I can be sure???
Saturday mornings on the boat are usually lazy, unless we have a major boat project we're working on which, at the moment, we blessedly do not. We cover the V-berth hatch with some of that insulated foil sandwich stuff so the sun doesn't wake us up and we sleep in late. We make some iced coffee in the summer, or hot coffee in the winter, and then I poke around lazily making some muffins or coffee cake. It's wonderful to have the boat filled with baking goodness - cinnamon, nutmeg, and warm blueberries...can't you just smell it wafting past your nose? Fortunately they don't take long to make. This recipe is a heavily modified one from The Pioneer Woman which, if you've never visited is worth the time. By the way, if you think you're seeing a lot more organic ingredients in my pictures, you're right. The more research I do on the food allergy issue I mentioned in my post In Search of Real Food a while back, and the more meals I prepare with organic foods and experience the taste difference, the more convinced I am that it's the right way to go. Once we're on the boat it may even be easier to get organic fruits and vegetables because of local fruit markets. We'll see.
Ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1-3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
Heavy pinch of salt
Dash of nutmeg
Dash of cinnamon
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 egg
1 heaping cup of plain yogurt
2 tsp vanilla
1-1/2 cups fresh blueberries
Line muffin tins with paper liners or grease with butter. Mix topping ingredients together in small bowl using fork or small whisk to cut butter into mixture until it looks like small crumbs. Set aside.
Mix together flours, soda, baking powder, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar in bowl.
In another bowl mix together oil, egg, yogurt and vanilla.
You need to have everything ready in their separate bowls because once you begin to mix the wet and dry ingredients together you have to move fairly quickly. good, tender, moist muffins are the result of evenly distributed ingredients mixed quickly.
Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients just till the dry ingredients are incorporated into the wet ingredients. Fold in blueberries. Sorry, no pictures here because I was distracted by my Captain who is learning Spanish and had some questions. Do not overmix - if you overmix the batter your muffins will be dense and tough. Spoon into muffin tins - 24 for small muffins, 18 for medium muffins or 12 for super-huge-better-not-be-on-a-diet muffins. Top with a spoonful of topping mixture. Bake 400° for 20-35 minutes. The time depends on the size muffins and your oven, so set it for 15 minutes and begin to check them until you get a feel for the time you need. Enjoy!
I used to make some stuffed mushrooms once upon a time that had crab in them. That was before my captain developed a late-in-life rather severe allergy to shellfish (I know, I know...shellfish allergy when you're planning on being a full-time cruiser...). A good friend of ours at the marina was kind enough to pass on his recipe for cheese stuffed mushrooms and they've been a tremendous substitution for the old crab ones. These can be done in the oven or on the grill. They make a great summer weather side dish for chef salad, our meal for this evening on the boat.
Ingredients:
1 14oz package of mushrooms
8 oz package of Neufchatel cheese
1/3 to 1/2 cup grated parmesan
1/2 to 1-1/2 tsp garlic salt
Directions:
Wipe mushrooms with paper towel dipped in ice water. NOTE: if you wipe them this way they don't get slimy the way they do if you wash them. Remove stem and put the mushrooms in a cast iron skillet or 8" square pan.
Mix cheese, parmesan and garlic salt in bowl. Divide cheese mixture in mushrooms evenly, putting a heaping teaspoon in each mushroom indentation.
Top with an additional sprinkle of parmesan. Grill till tender and cheese is lightly browned or bake at 400° till tender and cheese is lightly browned, about 20-25 minutes.
When I do these in my boat oven I need to put them under the broiler the last 5 minutes.
I've had a love/hate relationship with the idea of owning silicone bakeware. I've wanted to add it to the boat's galley inventory because it fits in unusually shaped spaces since it's flexible, and because it doesn't corrode in salty air, and because it's easier to fit in smaller galley sinks since it's flexible. The only problem is that every piece of silicone bakeware that I've ever used had one rather annoying disadvantage - they all stuck food to them even though the main advertised feature was the non-stick aspect. So I've bought them and discarded them over the years and ended up with my regular rusting pans on the boat.
This is a truly amazing pan that I bought because of an Amazon review. It appears that the reason most silicone bakeware sticks is that it's not 100% silicone. The HIC Brands that Cook pans are all 100% silicone with no fillers. This was news to me and since I've always had very successful results when basing a purchase on an Amazon review, I went ahead and ordered one. My cupcakes baked beautifully, didn't stick, and the pan washed up like new. I did have to put a regular cookie sheet under it to support it as it's a little more flexible than I was comfortable with in trying to get it in and out of the oven, but you could use a pizza peel to do the same.
I do a lot of baking for some allergy-laden kids on the GAPS diet, and the muffins and cupcakes are moister and have less structure than ones baked with grain so I was concerned that the edges might not crust enough to hold them together. Not to worry. Today I made a batch of White Bean Chocolate Cupcakes for my granddaughter's birthday party and they turned out beautifully. So if you're in the market for a good silicone muffin pan, travel on over to Amazon and then enjoy this delicious bit of chocolaty goodness.
1 can white beans, drained and rinsed (navy, great northern, etc.
5 Tbl coconut oil
1/2 Cup honey
5 small or 4 large eggs
1 Tbl vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 Cup cocoa powder
2 oz melted unsweetened chocolate
Blend all in a blender or use a stick blender until smooth. Divide evenly into a 12-cup silicone muffin pan. Bake 350° for 25 minutes. If you bake these in a regular metal muffin pan and use regular paper liners a lot of the cupcake will stick to the paper. You can use parchment paper liners but the silicone is the best. Makes 12 moist delicious cupcakes that don't even need icing.
