a recipe I'm really looking forward to trying...

 How about a meatless chorizo recipe from Annie Hill?

A little education is no bad thing...

 How about a class on seaweed foraging?

A crowd funding campaign worth checking out...

She had me at zero waste.

 

More info here.

Some recipes on my must try out list...

Force-E, a dive shop in Florida has an excellent feature on their website entitled Cooking the Local Catch of recipes for fish and critters that are well worth checking out and bookmarking.

Here's the Lionfish  dish that caught my attention...

See what I mean?

Some fish tacos...

Mako Spearguns shares their fish taco recipe...

a book I must get and a couple I already have...

I'm not a huge fan of the add a can of this to a can of that school of cookbook writing... Fact of the matter is to put it bluntly I hate them.

Of course, most cookbooks of the cruising on a sailboat ilk are by and large full of add a can of this to a can of that recipes. Kind of bummer that.

It does not have to be that way...

One of the food blogs I read on a daily basis is Nourished Kitchen whose stated purpose is to revive traditional foods (which in my mind translates in real food).

I've never read a bad recipe on the blog which from me is say a lot. So it's not a real big surprise that I'm excited about the current cookbook "the Nourished Kitchen" by Jennifer McGruther...

More importanly all of the recipes in the book are actually a lot more boat and cruiser friendly than you'd expect. Fact is cooking with real ingredients is a lot easier than yopu've been told by folks who have a vested interest in selling you value added/overly processed products with highly inflated prices.

So yeah, "the Nourished Kitchen" is going to be a permanent fixture on my galley shelf.

Another new cookbook I recently bought is "The Homesick Texan's Family Table" by Lisa Fain and it is even better than her previous book
"The Homesick Texan's Cookbook" which is actually a a pretty impressive feat considering how good the first one is.

Not only a lot of good recipes but all are very boat friendly, simple, affordable, and very, very tasty.

Three books dealing with real food and not a single add a can of this to a can of that with an envelope of onion soup mix recipe anywhere...

We're back on track...

I really like food...

I mean I really like food. I'm sure a lot of you understand the emphasis.

The problem is cooking on a boat in a world spiraling towards harder times and keeping the boat stocked with good and healthy ingredients on a budget takes no small amount of work and creativity. That's the downside.

On the other hand, the upside is creativity is an enjoyable pastime from where I sit and, whenever you make a good meal aboard, the gratification is there for the tasting.

When we were cruising in Spain we met a well off American couple who were sailing their boat home to the States to sell it and buy an RV because they could not find Hellman's mayonnaise in Europe. Seriously the lack of "proper" mayonnaise in Europe was the deal breaker...

I'll let that sink in for a moment.

At the time I thought they were nuts... Firstly because mayonnaise is pretty easy to make. Secondly because I'd never actually thought of Hellman's as being real mayonnaise but more a sorta/kinda chemical sludge doing a bad mayonnaise imitation, and lastly, how had they escaped the fact that Europe was brimming with awesome freshly made mayonnaise and not taken advantage?

Over the years I've reflected on this more times than I can count because it tells a story and that story is just how important food is to how happy/unhappy we are... Mayonnaise is a silly example but it so perfectly illustrates just how important food can be.

Food is a lot more than just being a fuel that powers our engine and, as times become harder, it's going to be even more important to fulfil those more esoteric needs in a frugal galley.

So, consider this a restatement of purpose of sorts.

Boat friendly sorta/kinda Mac and Cheese...

Post punk kitchen gets it all kinds of right...

Provisions... A few thoughts on the dried stuff

I've been meaning to catch up on provisioning and it's funny how things change when looking at what you've eaten in hindsight.

For instance, we've eaten a lot of dried carrots over the last few months due to the fact that carrots have been silly expensive of late and at best rather low quality. Looking down the shopping list it also becomes apparent that the same could be said for broccoli. At $3.69 a pound broccoli has us reaching for the dried stuff on a regular basis...

The other dried vegetables we use all the time is the Harmony House dried vegetable soup mix that we never use as a soup but more of a throw-a-handful-in-the pressure-cooker-with-whatever-we-are-cooking-for-a-vegetable-boost sort of thing. Seriously, I should buy this stuff by the case...

Altoids you can make on your boat...

Folks, they had me as soon as they mentioned coffee....

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.

Braised red cabbage...

Cabbage is something of a cruising staple as it keeps for ages without refrigeration and is more often than not ...cheap. What's not to like?

Sadly though, most folks don't do the noble cabbage justice when it comes to bringing it to the table and some might even be surprised that it is for something other than cole slaw or  an adjunct to corned beef...

Lucky for us that LobsterSquad has an awesome recipe for Braised Red Cabbage using a pressure cooker!  Perfect for a holiday or any old day...

On making your own ricotta cheese...

The other day while shopping I noticed that ricotta cheese had had a big price hike to make it simply too expensive for anything but serious entertaining which is silly as ricotta is more of a basic day to day staple...

As it happened the store in question always has near its end day milk on deep discount and as I passed the milk section I wondered why things I don't use are always cheap and on sale while the stuff I want keep going up.

What did not occur to me at the time is that ricotta is so easy to make (even on a boat) that it's really silly to buy it when cheap milk is available.

So it goes...

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!

Eating on a $1.25 a day...

Stone Soup shows it can be done...

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!

Good reads...

Leslie Kelly has a great post on Serious Eats though it is hardly surprising as her Blog Whining & Dining is one of my must read foodie-on-a-budget blogs...

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

An alternative to meat...

Meat while cruising can be (depending on your mindset) either problematic or "interesting" and a fallback protein source is no bad thing to have onboard. This one over at Cheap,Healthy,Good is way better than a fallback and could easily become a regular part of the menu...