Auspicious

Anna, It looks like it tastes wonderful. I like the rice form - what dd you use? I might have fanned the peas, fanned the tomatoes on top, and fanned the skirt steak next to them. Even if I'm cooking just for myself I get fussy. We all have our oddities. My wife wants everything in serving dishes. I go from cookware to a presentation plating. To each their own. I envy you the tomatoes and peas - we aren't seeing anything that looks that good down here.

You are not alone. TSA will put you on a watch list. *grin*

I'm having a little trouble with the whole concept of mussels and French fries, but y'all invented poutine up there so who knows. Yes, yes, I know that poutine is a Québécois thing but you are supposed to be adult supervision out there in BC. *grin*

We clearly move in different circles. *grin*

Thank you @Smithy. That looks brilliant. I ordered the stainless steel (no color) one without a handle (one less thing to get snagged and go flying as an offering to Neptune *grin*). I watched the videos and read many of the reviews. I usually focus on the low reviews. Many are from people who will complain about anything but it does often expose weak spots. I'll report back. I like the mechanism including the lock which is not unlike the lock on my Nalgene. I also like the cleaning access although some reviewers didn't like it. We'll see. It should be here Monday. I haven't been shy posting about not finding a decent spill and leak-proof travel mug. This is the most promising since a Camelbak that turned out to be spill proof but leaked. Smithy - can you get the o-ring out, clean it, and lube it with food-safe mineral oil? That would be my initial approach.

Hollywood hasn't done reality any favors about boats. Stick a bunch of adults in a small space with tiny bathrooms and we all know more than we are used to. Privacy is a state of mind and a gesture of respect.

If I ate pizza with pineapple or ham (or both *shudder*) I would not be allowed back in NY. NJ would make me wear an ankle bracelet.

Sure. In a kitchen ashore that makes all kinds of sense. With only two burners on a moving platform that can be a bit of gilding the lily. Remember that water is a limited resource, there are only two burners (usually), you can't put anything down without risking it launching across the boat, motion makes EVERYTHING take longer, and--on someone else's boat--basic tools like spiders can't be counted on. Can you? Sure. Should you? Often not.

Eno is a well established European company headquartered in France that has made boat cookers for decades. Good stuff. They bought Force 10 some years ago; 2009? 2010? Something like that. Force 10 was a North American company also almost entirely in the business of marine cookers. Force 10 was headquartered in BC Canada where the combined operations for the Americas are now headquartered. The original plan was to position Force 10 internationally as premium products and Eno as entry-level and builder grade products. That hasn't worked out. The market for Force 10 is principally selling in North America and the Caribbean. Eno continues to dominate European sales. Both are readily available in the ROTW. The good news is that spare parts for both brands are now available from a common supply chain. Both are easily serviced and maintained.

In North American the brand of English mustard I see most often is Colman's. It is available both dry and prepared. In a pinch Chinese hot mustard, even in the small plastic packets, will do. I tend not to take brown sugar to sea. It clumps badly enough in inland pantries. At sea it turns into a brick in short order. Remember that brown sugar is just sugar and molasses. Accordingly I carry sugar which has a broad range of application and molasses which does as well. Pork is a great protein, religious beliefs among the crew permitting. Rather than chops I usually roast a whole pork loin early in a trip. It's easy. Leftovers, sliced thinly, go toward sandwiches. Remaining leftovers get combined with barbecue sauce (I cheat - use a bottle at sea) for another dinner. I treat chicken breasts similarly: if I'm going to roast or grill chicken I make a lot and leftovers go to chicken salad and/or a stir fry. Like @JohnT I'll do some prep at home before departure, just as leisure boaters will for a weekend outing IF departure location is close enough. Often there are airplanes between home and the boat which can be awkward, particularly as security lines and other delays get longer and longer. Some stomachs, even among experienced crews can be unsettled the first day or so. Whether I make something at home, onboard before departure (rare - there is a lot to do), or underway I try to choose meals that are gentle on stomachs. I am not a doctor or a dietician. Keeping up with these issues makes a difference in the success of a voyage. As an engineer I have great respect for peer-reviewed science. What seems to make the difference is whether a food triggers the over-production of stomach acid; this is not always correlated with food acidity directly. Sliced mild pickles, while acid, are generally not a problem for example. High fat content foods are almost always a trigger. That leads to an entirely different set of decisions during shopping. Low-fat and no-fat yogurt is great while some people will find full fat yogurt unsettling. Cheese-dominated dishes may work or not depending on the cheese selected. I avoid fried food and am careful even with sautes. Always low-fat mayo on sandwiches. Mustard, although usually acidic, is fine for most people. Odd isn't it? I've spent a lot of time down the rabbit hole of the science behind acid reflux. That most directly (behind only military studies for crew performance) addresses stomach acid generation. While the science is sometimes weak it appears that tomato skin is for some reason a bigger trigger than the flesh or gel. That's why, I believe people with serious acid reflux are advised to avoid fresh and raw tomatoes but prepared or canned sauces are okay. Since we're on physiological effects of boating I'll share some other related thoughts that apply whether you are crossing an ocean or spending a weekend on the water. I'll be as genteel as possible. Dehydration is a real problem. On my prep list for crew is to bring a reusable water bottle like those from Nalgene and for those inclined to hot coffee or tea a car cup that has a sealing top. The water bottle I personally prefer is this Nalgene Tritan 24oz On the Fly (OTF) BPA-Free Water Bottle because it has a latching top and a secondary lock ring. It won't fail and make a mess if knocked over. I carry three on trips - active, in fridge, and one for some kind of powdered mix. I have yet to find a car cup that is really leak proof. If you think you have one please fill it, close it, and knock it over. If it doesn't leak I beg you to send me a link. I'll buy it and recommend it to my crews. Returning to hydration, aside from long-term health a dehydrated person doesn't sleep well and judgment deteriorates. I pay attention to water consumption and visits to the head. I don't keep track per se, I just pay attention. If I think someone is not drinking enough water we'll have a private chat that ends with a charge to pay attention to *ahem* the color of some things. That is usually sufficient. Water consumption also helps with the other bane of people operating in high motion environments: constipation. *sigh* Sorry. It's real. Vibration (high frequency movement) and motion (low frequency movement) do have an effect on the human body. Lots of water helps. Preparation H helps as a lubricant. Diet helps. High fiber helps but is slow (days) to take effect. Low fat helps faster. Which returns to roles. On recreational boats, even a weekend or evening outing, roles that have dedicated people overlap. That means, on my boats, that I may be skipper, purser, cook, and medical officer. That means the establishment of a degree of trust. It's easier for me. People put their lives in my hands by signing up to crew for me across an ocean. This is much more difficult for a purely recreational boater out for a daysail with friends. Good friends don't want to be a bother. You on the other hand want them to have a good time. That means some understanding of how to help and establishing trust to share information that makes people feel a little uncomfortable. Little kids are easy - they just tell you. Adults are harder. *grin* You need to be open without making people worry. A lot depends on relationships and expertise. Good luck. I've wandered a bit off cookery here. In my defense the cook, skipper or not, is often the medical officer. I'll end with a light-hearted story. I was taking a big Swan from Oxford MD to Bitter End Yacht Club in North Sound, Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands. We got crew on board - a big one as there were a lot of berths and the owner was okay with feeding everyone. We had to wait for the tide in the morning (about 4a) to get out due to the draft of the boat. The owner kindly took us out to dinner. Sitting around on board afterward someone asked what they had brought along. Note this was some time ago, perhaps 2007. By the time we got all the way around (I went last since I was skipper) and adding in what we had on board already with the boat we had something on the order of eight handheld VHF radios and ten GPS receivers. Really? So everyone leaned forward to see what Dave had brought: an analog meat thermometer and a stick blender. Guess what we used on that trip? Yep. The thermometer and the blender. Food counts. sail fast and eat well, dave Dave Skolnick S/V Auspicious AuspiciousWorks.com

Good question. Depends on the boat and trip duration. Lots of cruising boats do have microwaves. Power for that may come from batteries through an inverter or directly from a generator. Using an inverter means having to charge the batteries again which may come from wind, solar, main engine alternator, or generator. Main engine or generator means drawing on fuel which is a limited resource on passage or cruising off the grid. There are lots of fixed consumers of power (navigation electronics, refrigeration, lights) before luxury items like microwaves. Resource management is key to a pleasant voyage.

If you are cooking underway (different from moving from anchorage to anchorage or marina to marina) everything takes longer than you are used to. Efficiencies of scale are always valuable. Usually water is a limited resource. Even with a watermaker onboard you don't want to be dependent on it working. I'll share one of the things I do to be efficient. Consider that most pastas take about 12 minutes to cook. Making hard cooked eggs takes about 12 minutes. Doing both at once in the same pot in the same water saves time, cooking fuel, and water. If you have enough pots and space you can save the pasta water for other uses: rinse water for growing sprouts, cooking oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, parboiling veg for a roast, or anything else where the starchy water won't be a problem. One of the guidelines of offshore sailing (for those who have watched the movie Pirates of the Caribbean "they aren't so much rules as what you would call guidelines") is not to let anything go down a drain or over the side without considering whether it might be useful for something else. Reusing cooking water is one. Something else I often do is to cut the top and bottom off a small can. This is getting harder as more cans have formed bottoms instead of rolled edges top and bottom. When you can cut both lids off and leave a ring you can use that for cooking/steaming eggs for egg sandwiches. You can also use the rings for forms for rice for an attractive dinner. Every little bit of morale boost at sea is helpful, even if it is as simple as nice presentation at dinner. Same as at home.

I'm glad you have delivery as an option also. My grandmother walked to Pathmark (her grocery) and back with a wheeled cart. In her 80s she started taking the bus home (right in front of the store to a block from home), then bus to the store and cab home. I think she got more exercise in her 80s than I do in my late 50s. *sigh* Maybe I should go for a walk this morning before I settle into work. I cut the cord with the phone company in 1994, pretty early in the cell phone boom. When my wife and I got together in 2007(ish) she had three phone numbers in the house: personal, work (home office), and fax. It took me a couple of years but I weened her off all of them. Now we each have a cell phone and a "family" number that rings both phones. Fax comes in over a dedicated Internet service. Total cost is a lot cheaper and for us a lot more flexible than hard lines. I'm not trying to talk you out of your Princess phone. *grin* Just reflecting on our quite different approaches to communications. best, dave

@Thanks for the Crepes Giving up shopping myself is always a challenge. On boat deliveries (see the Boat Cookery thread) if something on the boat keeps me from shopping I just know something will be wrong. *sigh* Have you tried asking someone at the service desk to call your cab home before you get in line? Just a thought. I won't go down the rabbit hole of having a cell phone. *grin* Is there a place for notes with InstaCart, or a box that specifies no substitutions? I've seen that before. I can see how the delivery charge is a good choice compared to cabs. Still, do you like getting out of the house? Yes grocery shopping is work, but do you enjoy it? I certainly do but that doesn't mean it is anything but a chore for you. Different strokes. It's nice to know that there are options in places like Cary. We're just starting to see decent delivery options (not that I use them, but I'm glad to see them) in Annapolis MD where I live.

A convection oven should not exhaust anything. The whole point is to circulate heated air to avoid thermal gradients. If there are particles coming out there is a problem, probably with a seal. If the issue is a puff of particles when you open the door the answer is easy: turn the convection fan off a few minutes before you open the door to give airborne particles a chance to settle. Oh - clean the oven regularly, starting with a vacuum cleaner before applying chemicals or other liquids.

It seems to me you have two approaches. The gluten-free path should recognize that the reason bread crumbs work in meatloaf is because of particle size. I've tried rice before (I ran out of bread) and it just didn't work well for me. That was with 85/15 ground beef - 70/30 might work better. Kikkoman among others do make gluten-free bread crumbs (apparently available at Target). That should work structurally. Taste? Not so sure. GF foods seem to share a startlingly taste pallet with packing material. The second approach depends on your intestinal fortitude and the nature of your relationship with your friend. "Look dude, bring me a doctor's note that this is real and not some self-diagnosed fantasy and I'll find a way to meet your needs. In the meantime eat or go hungry." Tough love. Good luck.

@Smithy The first boat I raced I on after college spoiled me for other boats. I've never recovered. Lief's wife would make us these great meals. She kept track of likes and dislikes and packed us off with meals labeled for each crew. Good stuff also. Just wow. Lots of race boats are BYO which I think is unfortunate. Yes owners have a lot of expenses. Crew are their best and biggest resource. These days I get invited aboard various boats as coach and tactician several times a year. When the owner catches up with me after the race they ALWAYS ask what they should be buy to be more competitive. My answer is always the same: lessons. Owners then start whining about the cost and I point out that it's cheaper than a sail. *grin* It's also a major retention and recruitment tool. "Hey did you hear Joe sent the whole crew to J/World for tactics?" Back-up reserve food that you referred to is important. The sort of foods you note are important. You probably won't need them and when you don't you take them home and they go in the pantry. By golly if you need them having them on board is the difference between an inconvenience and a crisis. You also mentioned convenience food. I keep a snack bag - not junk food, but easy hand food: fruit, crackers, cheese, hard-cooked eggs, cut-up veg, jerky, granola bars, .... People eat for many reasons beyond hunger, most especially including boredom, fear, and concern. The snack bag also keeps them from rummaging about in my fridge. *grin*

A perfectly reasonable dinner. Since you have a garden lettuce is surely in abundance. When it gets so hot the lettuce bolts or in winter when it is expensive and mediocre I use home-grown sprouts. Quite good.

Since few boaters cross oceans, which @JohnT and I focused on, I thought I'd talk about shorter trips on smaller boats for a bit. Many smaller boats don't have refrigeration so a moment on coolers is appropriate. The "expensive" quality coolers are worth every penny. I bought a good-sized (80qt?) Igloo cooler on sale. Over the years I spent a lot of money on handls, latches, hinges, and hold-downs. When the case finally failed due to cumulative UV deterioration I had many hundreds of dollars into the cooler. I replaced it with a Yeti 72qt cooler. Six or seven years downstream I have not had to replace any parts at all. Maintenance is limited to a few minutes once each year wiping the rubber latches with ArmorAll. Add that the insulation is much better than the basic grade of consumer cooler and the high end coolers are worth their price. Remember that there is nothing magic about ice. Cold is cold. If you're going out for a long weekend freeze what makes sense (casseroles, proteins, even bagged veg) as hard as you can and put that in the cooler on the sides and bottom to keep produce and other nominally refrigerated goods cool. A full cooler will be more thermally stable than a near empty one. Use gallon jugs of drinking water frozen solid at home to help fill space in your cooler. As we've said on this thread you can make nearly anything on board. If you are a day or evening sailor dipping your toe into longer trips why bite off too much at once? Sure you can make eggs Benedict with fresh Hollandaise but why? Yogurt and fruit or hard-boiled eggs and pre-cooked bacon are fine. Pasta salad or a commercial bag-o-salad with sliced ham or turkey are fine for lunch. Burgers, steak, chicken or such with a veg foil packet on the grill are just fine. It does help to have a basic plan, mostly so you pack the cooler with the things you'll use first on top. This reduces the amount of time the cooler lid is open and preserves the temperature.

I'm impressed with the RoccBox, particularly after watching the SeriousEats video. I'm unlikely to buy one, or any pizza oven, as my wife chooses a low-carb diet and so pizza is a treat. As a native New Yorker good pizza sense is baked into my DNA. At least it is in my opinion. *grin* I'm also an engineer so research into what works is important. See https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/34/how-choose-best-commercial-pizza-oven-business.html for a perspective that makes the consumer grade RoccBox look pretty good. Since you are now thinking about pizza, consider the story of Pizza Pi: https://www.pizza-pi.com/gallery-1/

Agree regarding the bloom. What I have found is that if you make sure they stay dry (a day or two of wiping them dry after they come home) and flip the entire container every couple of days to keep the albumin distributed on the inside of the shell eggs will last for many weeks if not months.

Why do you keep eggs in the fridge?

Straight to the important point. Hugs. *grin* If you toast bread in the toaster for grilled cheese and then into a pan to melt the cheese the outside gets overcooked if not charred. If you use untoasted bread the inside against the cheese (and for grown-up (*grin*) sandwiches tomato and onion) it can get a bit mushy. "Mushy" is a technical term. *grin* Instead I toast one side each of two pieces of bread in a dry skillet. This is, to digress, the way great-grandma Ida (<- a made-up person I use apocryphally) toasted bread. I still usually make toast this way at sea; see the Boat Cookery thread. Regardless, I build the sandwich with the toasted sides of the two slices of bread facing in toward the ingredients. Now I can toast the outsides of the sandwich, flipping halfway through, at the same time I warm up the ingredients so the cheese gets a little melty (<- another technical term) and the tomato becomes pleasantly warm. By no means do I suggest this is the "right" way. It is most effective and repeatable for me. I'm happy to share it. I often write rather long posts. It's good that I type reasonably fast. You, Elsie, went straight to the fundamentals. Outstanding.

Fritos, like Cheetos and other messy greasy over-salted snacks, have never appealed to me. I just don't get it. Triscuits. I like Triscuits. Low-salt. *grin*

Because times have changed. The large capital investment for facilities including buildings, presses, and trucks aren't necessary for electronic publications. In the past paid circulation was a major sales tool for advertising. Today there are reports of eyeballs on the screen - unique page views. Additionally data mining means a lot of specificity about readership - gender, age range, income, interests, etc. An advertiser doesn't pay to expose their ads to people outside their market. There are things I do pay for on the 'net. There must be a good value proposition. The apps on my phone for Apple News and Google News give me free access to all the major news outlets. Why should I pay just to see it on a larger screen? What is the value for me? The quality of writing and editing in the majors is down while political agendas shine through brightly. Why pay for that? Ads and content with intrusive technology such as autostart videos interrupt other things while I'm multi-tasking. Why pay for that? Let's not forget that not everyone has broadband and some of us (some always, some sometimes) pay by the bit or have data allocations. Pages laden with ads and Javascript already cost us data. Why pay for that? A thoughtful post. I'll admit I piled on to the wedge salad and grilled cheese band wagon early in this thread. Sometimes the value in an article (at least about cooking) is not the recipe but perhaps a technique. For example if there is a way to cut a head of iceberg lettuce into six equal wedges without either a protractor for the 60° angles and to avoid the layers of lettuce disassembling I'd be interested in that. For a publisher who consistently provided that sort of information I *would* pay. I could have elaborated on my grilled cheese recipe above to talk about WHY I toast one side of the bread in a dry skillet before assembling the sandwich and toasting the outsides while heating the cheese just to the melting point. Share a recipe and your audience has a recipe. Walk them through techniques using the recipe as an example or an exercise and some portion of the audience will really learn something. Give a man a fish or teach him to fish? Which goes back to the value proposition. The NYT Cooking section lost value when they cancelled Harold McGee's column. What other missteps have they taken? How long can they coast (in Cooking and in general) based on a reputation they no longer live up to?