A link you should check out...

Some really good advice over at Nourished Kitchen (one of my favorite food blogs ).

What we eat...

When all is said and done we don't eat a lot of meat aboard "So It Goes". Face it, meat, as in beef/pork/lamb/chicken/etc, is not all that boat friendly...

Luckily, folks don't really need all that much meat. For instance, an adult male requires around 56 grams of protein a day which works out to a single serving of seven ounces of chicken/beef/pork.

Obviously, we in the US of A eat a lot more animal protein than we actually need.

Truth is, since most people get a lot of protein from other sources (milk products/eggs/beans/nuts/etc) hardly anyone actually needs anywhere near seven-ounces of meat a day...

That being said, from time to time I'm not all that adverse to a big steak or prime rib but it is very much a VERY occasional thing. Though, after reading about current decisions in the USA meat business I expect I'll be eating even less meat in the future.

You should check this out...

Dave over at TriloBoat talks food!

A better way to bake onboard...

I've been on something of a baking binge of late and it's nice to have that smell that says "spice cake" and suchlike...

Part of the reason for the baking is that I recently purchased a stove top oven and it has worked out so well that I actually want to bake. The secret is the new oven does not heat up the boat's interior like our old oven did. Trust me, when it's 85 degrees outside the idea of making a carrot cake is seldom on my list of things to do, and it is always about 85 here in the tropics...

There is not much to the oven in question... a pan with a hole in it, a bundt pan, and a cover. In a word, simple.

Of course, on a boat, simple is no bad thing! Speaking of no bad things... so are pans and suchlike that stow easily, and in the case of the Ominia oven it even comes with it's own little nylon bag to keep the bits together.

While the bundt pan is not huge it does make a full sized cake or, to be more precise, is just the right size for a standard cake mix of the Duncan Hines/Betty Crocker variety.

All in all, this is an excellent product and very well thought out. So much so that I've decided not to bother getting a new stove with an oven in the current round of galley makeovering as this one does the job so well!

What's not to like?

Kinda important message...

Trying to get TVP to pull its own weight...

Back when I was in college I spent a lot of time in vegetarian eateries and one in particular was really exceptional in that you never even noticed they did not serve meat...

Part of their success was that they really knew how to cook and were masterful in the way they adapted the sort of things people actually eat into a menu that people wanted to eat. So how did they do it?

My guess is that they, like all good kitchens, realized that a meal or dish is always multi-faceted and paid a lot of attention to the big three... flavor, texture, and presentation. Cooking vegetarian dishes that taste good is no big issue as vegetables on the whole simply taste good. Presentation is also pretty easy with a little thought and flair. On the other hand, texture for me is the more difficult aspect of vegetarian cooking... And in this area they really excelled using tofu and TVP in ways that really brought dishes together and worked.

Most vegetarian dishes are somewhat challenged on the texture front and most cooks compensate by doing dishes that are not big on textures... soups, for instance. Adding tofu or TVP can add texture but often don't bring along their fair share of taste to the process and, more often than not, I prefer that they don't even bother...

So here is my personal frustration... Having experienced a kitchen that really could make TVP and tofu work in a way that did not elicit a "why bother" reaction I know it can be done but, truth be told I'm having a lot of trouble working through the process to get my Strogannoff using either tofu or  TVP chunks to work in a way that you'd rather not just have the sauce over noodles... Know what I mean?

I've been hearing a lot of good things about "The TVP Cookbook" and will be giving it a read to see if I can ramp up my use of TVP in the galley and get to a higher culinary plateau...

Which is not to say I'm giving up meat, but TVP does make all kinds of sense in a cruising boat scenario as it is easy to store and costs very little. So you might say I find myself motivated to make it work the way I know it can.

Seafood watch guides...

The Monterey Aquarium has some excellent downloadable pocket guides and apps on it's website to help you choose the right "ocean friendly" fish or critter while shopping. The guides are done by regions and are well worth the download...

Of course, the best means of securing ocean friendly seafood is to catch it yourself as it is sometime difficult or impossible to sort out if the Mahi Mahi on offer is local and caught by trolling or pole (Best Choice) or the AVOID sort (imported)...

Color me surprised, dried eggs I like...OvaEasy

Back when we were living in France and cruising about, eggs were a non-problematic issue as they were mostly not refrigerated. In fact, it was illegal for anyone to sell refrigerated eggs in France and this was no bad thing...

It might surprise most people but refrigeration radically cuts down on the shelf life of a lot of products, especially eggs. In the States and down here in the Caribbean almost all eggs are refrigerated and unless you keep them refrigerated they tend to go off.

The other day at the local discount store they had some packages of dried eggs with a clever name. My last memories of dried eggs was the sort of awful breakfast you'd find yourself trying to feed to feral dogs in the boonies of SE Asia (who, I might add, had better sense than to actually eat it). So dried eggs are not exactly a warm & fuzzy memory.

Old memories aside, with the recent problems with eggs and the recalls, I've been somewhat nervous about buying eggs of late and so with a "what the hell" bought a package to give them a try...

The verdict after trying them is way better than expected. In fact, hardly any difference could be found between the OvaEasy eggs and those that came fresh out of a shell. The downside, of course, is that if you sre like me and addicted to over-easy eggs with runny yolks, you're just plain out of luck. On the other hand, for doing omelets, scrambled and general cooking purposes, the OvaEasy eggs are excellent and for a cruising boat something of a slam dunk!

The cost down here was $3.39 for an envelope containing the makings of a dozen eggs which is not too much higher than what a dozen eggs go for locally. One thing that surprised me about our price when compared with stateside pricing, $3.39 is actually cheap. I'll be seriously stocking up on these next time I go to the store.

A years supply of food...

I noticed today that CostCo has a deal going on dried and freeze-dried foods in a years-supply-for-one-person selection that comes to a total of $799.99... YOWZA! That said, like all of the years' supply of food kits I have seen, the selection of actual food selection is somewhat dire but there is a lot to be said for $2.19 a day price tag!

Over the last couple of years we have been making an effort to incorporate more dried and long-life foods into our diet for a variety of reasons...

One being that the cost of food in the Caribbean has been getting more and more pricey and a second reason is that while the prices of produce and suchlike keep getting higher there seems to be an inverse situation with quality. As the prices go higher the quality gets more dire. Case in point: the other day we were shopping and the scraggy/gnarly only good for pressure cooking carrots were selling for $1.79 a pound as opposed to the normal 69¢... OUCH! It's scary when meat has become cheaper than vegetables!

Another reason being that, living down here in the Caribbean, we often have periods where some produce and other foodstuffs just don't make it down to the islands. Sometimes for  a week or so you will have empty shelves in the supermarkets until the next container ship from Miami makes it down... It's a bitch being at the last link of a distribution chain whether it is toilet paper, cat food or broccoli!

Canned goods have fallen out of favor here on "So It Goes" as the quality of cans are such that they tend to rust in short order and we have never liked canned vegetables (we'll make an exception with canned corn or green beans) but for the most part, canned goods just don't cut it as far as we are concerned.

Dried vegetables on the other hand are pretty good as they store well, taste good (drying actually intensifies flavor) and are pretty reasonable cost-wise. The downside is that there is bugger all in the way of how to cook with dried vegetables cookbooks of a culinary bent and the learning curve in how to use dried food is something of a steep sucker.

Getting back to the CostCo stuff, I should point out that most of the purveyors of dried fruit and vegetable are not really boat-friendly in that they are seriously into bulk packaging which for most companies starts at number 10 cans (1 gallon) and goes up from there... I don't know about you, but trying to stow 84 gallon sized cans around the boat is somewhat problematic or in the case of our 34-foot boat, simply impossible.

Which is one of the reasons we like companies like Harmony House as they have a variety of sizes that range from a cup (sample size), quart pantry size, and in gallon family sized jugs (not cans) which are all very boat friendly resealable packaging and sizing. An added bonus of the smaller packaging is that you can try something and if you don't like it you are not stuck with nearly a gallon of beets (or whatever) that you hate!

For us, the advantage of having a store of dried food is that when carrots reach a silly price, dreadful quality or are simply not available where we happen to be, we can still have carrots or whatever on the menu tonight...

Great ideas to save money...

Stone Soup is on something of a roll these days with eating on $1.50 (US) a day series and even better they just did 18 tips to cut your food costs... Read it here!

More than lentil soup...

I've always really liked lentils and they make an incredible lot of sense on a boat as they are tasty, quick to cook, and cheap...

Whole Story makes a great case for the much underrated legume. Check it out!

Would you eat this at home?

While change is most certainly in the cards for most people setting off to go to far flung places on a sailboat, change is not always such a good thing...

We have always been amazed what some people think of as "cruising food" and wonder why folks load up on some foods they would not touch with a barge pole back in their normal world. For instance, when was the last time you had folks over to the house or went out for a big heaping plate of Spam?

Spam, by the way,  is no bad thing and I have spent enough time in Hawaii to be amazed and delighted at what can be done with it, but unless you already have a taste for Spam (or other interesting canned mystery meats) you might want to rethink the canned meat scenario. On the other hand, if you have already laid in a couple of cases you might want to check out "Hawaii's Spam Cookbook" or "Hawaii Cooks with Spam" which may help you survive the experience.

Actually, cans of any sort on a boat can be problematic... It's not that they rust (but they do) or the hassle factor but simply that most canned goods are really big on additives and salt. While a can here or there is no bad thing but a steady diet of canned food is simply not real good for you. and just about every place we have ever sailed fresh vegetables and suchlike have always been available... The idea of being someplace in the Med with awesome markets and a cornucopia of fresh vegetables freshly picked and then sitting down to dinner of Libby's canned brussels sprouts you've had for a couple of years is just not part of my cruising scenario.

The fact is, most of what you eat on land works just fine on a boat  so while you may have to change some aspects of your galley experience you really don't have to swap your favorite dishes for spaghetti O's!

The cost of cruising... First steps

One way or another when you begin to cruise you will change your eating habits... Face it, it's all part of the gig and it is a lot easier to embrace this as a positive than to bitch and moan and be an unhappy camper.

Some years ago while in the Canary islands we were talking to a couple with a great boat, a large budget, and all the toys, who could not wait to get back to the US of A and quit cruising because they could not find Hellman's mayo (and suchlike) ... REALLY! The fact was on Las Palmas there is really great (exceptional) shopping and any number of excellent mayo's available and all the fixings for making mayo from scratch but for them, life without their favorite brand was just not in the cards...

Which brings us to the bottom line of eating happily on boats is you will have to be able to adapt and if anything, you should look at it as a positive and enjoy it.

Since you will have to adapt, in the long run, it makes a lot of sense to adapt with a plan rather than simply react... Whether it is evolving a more frugal diet, a healthier one, or simply taking the opportunity to get involved with various ethnic foods and means of preparation, it is always easier with a plan! Since the subject at hand is the cost of cruising we will be talking more about the frugal side...

For most folks, meat is the first problem they run into. Meat has a limited shelf life, requires either refrigeration or preservation of some form (canning, drying, smoking), and when you get to far flung places it is often not at all like home in such things like the way cuts of meat are presented or aged. Face it, when a steak is not a steak for a lot of people it is serious culture shock.

Most people simply adapt by cutting back on meat which is no bad thing health or budget wise and some even cut out meat entirely... Both options you should consider or at least factor in to the equation as one of the easiest ways to cut down on the grocery and provisioning bill is to cut back on protein costs to a need rather than want level.

Which might be a good time to point you towards a couple of great links... 10 in 10 Diet is a great resource and makes it both easy and rather tasty to adapt towards a $150 per person per month food cost scenario and The Hummus Blog which I've recently found to be a finest-kind source of frugal and very tasty recipes for a meat light diet.

The perfect boat coffee maker...

The espresso maker we mostly use on "So It Goes" is just a bit past it's sell by date and every day I expect it to go towards the light...

While we have a French press style coffee maker the problem is it's glass and just that little too delicate for life aboard a sailboat so we never use it as the practical toughness of our espresso make always wins out.

That said, I really like French press coffee and have been keeping an eye out for years for something tough enough for the boat and not plastic... I don't know about you but for me coffee brewed in plastic always tastes... Well, kinda like plastic!

So I was very happy to find that Coleman has a new (well at least to me) all stainless French press coffee maker and it is exactly what I have been searching for...

Life is GOOD!

A bit of savings is always a nice thing...

We really like Harmony House products and they are the backbone of our long range provisioning plan. So it is always nice when you can save a bit when stocking the larder and as Harmony House is having a 15% discount through Sunday it's kind of a no-brainer for us.



Just use the code MOM

99 bottles of beer...

Being marooned in St Croix sans mast, one of the first things you notice is that the cost of beer is much higher than say, St Martin... Well, at least it is one of the first things I noticed!

Fact is, I'm not much of a beer drinker or to be more accurate I'm not big on the same old semi-generic lagers that pass for beer these days. Now if we were talking Moose Drool, it would be a whole different story...

Which has had me thinking along the lines of brewing my own beer... Sort of a nano-brewery I suppose.

The upside is that instead of paying $4 for a pint of decent beer (or $3 for Bud/Heinenken/Caribe) at the local micro brewery, I'd be paying less than 50¢, which makes Mr Cheapseats all warm and fuzzy, and the ability to have (at least if I get it right) beer that tastes like the sort of beer I actually like!

The downside is that finding room for said nano-brewery on "So It Goes" is going to entail building a "cool space" to house it (which is doable) and, well, just doing it... So these days, I'm spending some time reading various tomes on brewing and brewing equipment. While looking at various home brew kits like this one which seems to be the defacto standard or the smaller sort of the Mr Beer variety which would be a lot easier in the "I-live-on-a-very-small-boat" vein.

Basics...The bottom line

The other day I was thinking about basic provisions and the first thing that came to mind was garlic, followed closely by onions, but garlic is almost always the beginning of whatever gets cooked on "So It Goes".

Which is why My Sisters Kitchen caught my eye this morning with tales of Mojo de Ajo...