Food
We are often asked by friends and family what we eat. First we should describe the galley (kitchen in boat-speak) and its facilities. The refrigerator is by far the largest energy consumer on sailboats. Many cruisers run their engine for 1 hour or more per day to produce the energy needed to run their fridge. Our boat came with an old, inefficient refrigerator system from the early 80s and a poorly insulated ice box, which houses the cold-plate for the fridge. The refrigerator unit does not work and probably needs a change of Freon (the old ozone-depleting kind which is now banned in the US). Because we want to eliminate hassles and because we strive to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels by minimizing energy consumption, we have opted to go without a refrigerator. And let’s face it! We are frugal. Since we were living out of a car before moving onto the boat, it does not feel like a sacrifice at all.
Chandrika also came with a broken three burner stove with oven that runs on pressurized denatured alcohol. She also came with a hanging stove that uses small propane gas canisters, which are the size that one might take backpacking. The propane stove works excellently. It is even on gimbals, which allow it to swing back and forth, keeping the stove level while the boat is rolling and pitching about.
Unfortunately, the alcohol stove does not work. There are a number of leaks in the fuel lines making it impossible to use one burner without the others spewing out alcohol in several other places. While in Miami, thinking we would want an oven, Graham set about fixing it. After having searched and found spare parts from an old stove on EBay, he began disconnecting and reconnecting lines and cleaning out the tank and burners. When it came time to test the stove, Graham lit a match. There was a large bang, a flash of light and the smell of burnt human hair as Graham threw himself across the boat and away from the stove. We don’t need an oven!
Since leaving the states, we have mostly been using the same ingredients as the locals use: beans, rice, pasta, lentils and fish. Because we don’t have a fridge, we cook a separate lunch and dinner, and we do not make enough to have left-overs. Breakfast consists of cold cereal or cooked oats with fruit (bananas or raisins) and non-fat powdered milk. Our staples for lunch and dinner are pasta marinara (we make our own sauce from cans of tomato paste), rice and bean chili, refried beans on corn tostadas (flat tacos) or on tortillas, pasta and bean salad, tomato lentil soup with crackers, peanut curry pasta with canned tuna fish, and chicken tahini pasta, which with all the substitutions no longer has chicken or tahini.
Of course, our meals change from place to place, and we are constantly having to substitute one ingredient for another, depending on what is available. For example, for some unknown reason, pasta in Belize was very expensive, so we used rice instead. In Bocas del Toro, Panama, we could not find tostadas, tortillas or peanut butter. Natural peanut butter (without hydrogenated oils) has been very hard to find. We even resorted to making our own in Guatemala using a hand-crank corn-meal grinder.
Since Graham’s exploits with the oven, he has created a very excellent solution. Denatured alcohol when it is not pressurized in not explosive. So, Graham took an empty bean can and cut it in half to shorten it. We now fill the can with denatured alcohol, put it in the oven, light it, and viola! It works amazingly. It was then just a matter of figuring out the right size of can and the correct amount of fuel for the various things we bake. We can now bake fresh caught fish, scones, and home-made bread. What a treat! We are now even making home-made pizza when we are near a town where we can buy cheese. (It is sometimes hard in Latin America to find cheese that melts.) Graham was even able to bake an 8 pound whole turkey breast for our Thanksgiving feast with friends in Panama City.
We have discovered vegetables that survive well in the tropical heat without refrigeration, such as chayote and other kinds of squash, carrots, cabbage, etc. While there are foods from the US that we miss, if we were back in the states, we would miss many of the foods that are available here. For example, a man in a kayuka in the Bluefield Range paddled up to our boat and sold us 3 fresh pineapples for 40 cents each. We’ve also tried many new fruits, such as jack fruit, sapotilla, anona (or sour sop), manzana de agua, which means water apple in Spanish (it tastes nothing like apple), and many others. All of these fruits taste nothing like any of the fruits in the states so we can’t begin to describe them. There are also over 20 different species of bananas, which range widely in their tastes. Some taste more like potatoes, while others taste like apples and some like vanilla. While at times, we have been limited in our food choices, we certainly have not been suffering from lack of good foods.
2008
