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Smithy

Smithy


Speling

Back in my sailboat racing days I was rarely put in charge of the food, and it was interesting to see how the skipper dealt with the issue. Lake Superior is cold, year-round, and there's little as discouraging as spending 4 days choosing between cold sandwiches and instant ramen or soup in a styrofoam cup. (There may have been fruit also; I've put that particular Trans Superior Race more or less out of mind.) Other skippers I raced with were more interested in crew comfort, and over the years there have been frozen lasagna, heated in the (yes, gimbaled and yes, gimbals locked) oven as well as restaurant-quality boil-in-bag soups or dinners. Eggs and bacon for breakfast, in some cases, or hot or cold cereal. Sandwiches for lunch. On one much shorter race, when I was a novice cook but more interested in cooking than the other crew members, I cooked scrambled eggs with chunks of Jimmy Dean sausage mixed in. The skipper thought I was a gourmet cook! :laugh: Times and my cookery have changed since then.

 

Cruises are a different story than races, and probably more like the deliveries being discussed here. Last summer my husband, sister-in-law and I rented a 33' sloop for 4 days, and they let me take care of the food. We intended to spend every night docked somewhere on Lake Superior, but allowed for the possibility of its being too stormy or cold to want to use the barbeque grill latched to the stern rail. I purchased more food than we needed, due to that allowance, but we had plenty of choices and were never in danger of starving. As I recall the meals ran along these lines: Caprese salad with good fresh warm bread on the first night, with some of summer's finest tomatoes; pesto-stuffed boneless chicken thighs on the grill, with a fresh green salad and more bread on the second night; grilled kebabs that had by then thawed, over rice, for our final dinner. SIL and I preferred yogurt and fruit for breakfast; DH chose his usual cereal. I think we had scrambled eggs with cheese one day. Lunch tended to be sandwiches for DH and me and granola bars for SIL, which helps explain why she's much slimmer than I. We had fruit and pre-cut vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, celery sticks, etc.) for snacks.

 

Convenience foods that I brought along in case it was too miserable to cook were a selection of the aforementioned instant soups and ramens, and prepackaged ready-to-heat Indian foods: curries, saag paneer, precooked rice. That last was a surprise; Uncle Ben's actually offers some decent precooked, simply reheat, rice. Most of that stuff came home with us, and with the exception of the soups and ramens (which went to a food shelf) we've been enjoying them as quick dinners.

 

I think stir fries make a lot of sense, but didn't plan for them on that trip and certainly didn't expect a wok. I packed my own knives but trusted the charter company otherwise, and if I'd brought a wok I don't know where we'd have put it in that particular boat. The storage was pretty limited.

 

Here's a shot of the cooler, loaded for the trip:

20170703_113108.jpg

 

For the short time we were cruising the eggs couldn't have gone off anyway, but I'm glad to read @JohnT's and @Auspicious' advice to store them in cardboard rather than styrofoam, and to rotate them every day or so. That's good to know for the longer haul.

Smithy

Smithy

Back in my sailboat racing days I was rarely put in charge of the food, and it was interesting to see how the skipper dealt with the issue. Lake Superior is cold, year-round, and there's little as discouraging as spending 4 days choosing between cold sandwiches and instant ramen or soup in a styrofoam cup. (There may have been fruit also; I've put that particular Trans Superior Race more or less out of mind.) Other skippers I raced with were more interested in crew comfort, and over the years there have been frozen lasagna, heated in the (yes, gimbaled and yes, gimbals locked) oven as well as restaurant-quality boil-in-bag soups or dinners. Eggs and bacon for breakfast, in some cases, or hot or cold cereal. Sandwiches for lunch. On one much shorter race, when I was a novice cook but more interested in cooking than the other crew members, I cooked scrambled eggs with chunks of Jimmy Dean sausage mixed in. The skipper thought I was a gourmet cook! :laugh: Times and my cookery have changed since then.

 

Cruises are a different story than races, and probably more like the deliveries being discussed here. Last summer my husband, sister-in-law and I rented a 33' sloop for 4 days, and they let me take care of the food. We intended to spend every night docked somewhere on Lake Superior, but allowed for the possibility of its being too stormy or cold to want to use the barbeque grill latched to the stern rail. I purchased more food than we needed, due to that allowance, but we had plenty of choices and were never in danger of starving. As I recall the meals ran along these lines: Caprese salad with good fresh warm bread on the first night, with some of summer's finest tomatoes; pesto-stuffed boneless chicken thighs on the grill, with a fresh green salad and more bread on the second night; grilled kebabs that had by then thawed, over rice, for our final dinner. SIL and I preferred yogurt and fruit for breakfast; DH chose his usual cereal. I think we had scrambled eggs with cheese one day. Lunch tended to be sandwiches for DH and me and granola bars for SIL, which helps explain why she's much slimmer than I. We had fruit and pre-cut vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, celery sticks, etc.) for snacks.

 

Convenience foods that I brought along in case it was too miserable to cook were a selection of the aforementioned instant soups and ramens, and prepackaged ready-to-heat Indian foods: curries, saag paneer, precooked rice. That last was a surprise; Uncle Ben's actually offers some decent precooked, simply reheat, rice. Most of that stuff came home with us, and with the exception of the soups and ramens (which went to a food shelf) we've been enjoying them as quick dinners.

 

I think stir fries make a lot of sense, but didn't plan for them on that trip and certainly didn't expect a wok. I packed my own knives but trusted the charter company otherwise, and if I'd brought a wok I don't know where we'd have put it in that particular boat. The storage was pretty limited.

 

Here's a shot of the cooler, loaded for the trip:

20170703_113108.jpg

 

For the short time we were cruising the eggs couldn't have gone off anyway, but I'm glad to read @JohnT's and @Auspicious' advice to store them in carboard rather than styrofoam, and to rotate them every day or so. That's good to know for the longer haul.

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