A quick note about portions...

On my last few trips to the local Cost U Less I've been noticing that a lot of products have been changing their packaging and playing with the volume/weight...

This does not make me a happy camper!

In my world, a half-gallon bottle should actually contain a half-gallon, a five-pound bag of rice should contain five pounds and so on... The old standard one-pound package of spaghetti now seem to be 14-ounces or less.

Fiddling the amounts to increase profit is an old trick used by companies but, for those of us who do long term/range provisioning, it requires some higher math to figure out if you can get from point A to B without running out of something needful.

I don't know about you, but my higher math skills really suck when I'm forced to listen to piped in muzak while being jostled by folks who can't seem to control their shopping carts. So to be safe I tend to overbuy or not buy some stuff at all.

Kinda problematic!

Has the world gone crazy?

I went shopping a couple of days ago and noticed that Spam was more expensive than chicken and it got me curious!

As it happens, Spam was also more expensive than pork chops, beef roast, and most cuts of steak... Fact is, Spam was nearly the most expensive meat in the store... I also noticed that the other cheap meat in a can, corned beef, was also priced higher than stuff from the butcher counter.

Does this make any kind of sense at all?

Not that I'm knocking the whole Spam thing and in fact you can get quite creative with the stuff but still, Spam and corned beef have always been the cheap seats in the protein world so when did these become expensive?

Kinda important message...

I remember when a pound had sixteen ounces...

Doing our monthly provisions has become sort of an ongoing WTF experience as prices fof basics keeps getting more and more expensive...

Even more frustrating is the stealth downsizing of packaging so that when you think you are buying a pound of pasta in fact you are actually only getting 13.25 ounces.

Got to start reading those labels again...

A good book...

Living on a boat, it is easy to get a sense of the fish you put on your table and not so long ago the same could be said for commercial fishermen...

Not so much these days though... Most fishing decisions in the commercial sector are made in board rooms and is the thing of short term profits and balance sheets.

Bummer...

There is a small country where the fishermen fished sustainably and made a life for themselves. Well, until the waters of that country became a place for other more wealthy nations to deposit their toxic wastes while other nations' fishing vessels in factory ships stole what catch remained...

Welcome to Somalia in 2011! A country where people earn a couple of dollars a day if they have work and if they don't are simply out of luck. The fish are no longer there or stolen by industrial fishing concerns where short term profit is the only law. Hardly surprising that some of those local fishermen are angry and just might consider a different line of work... The real story is always a lot more complicated than you might think.

Big business fishing has never been about sustainability or caring about the environment and it never will be... But, it does not have to be that way.

All over the world there are still fishermen and women fishing in a way that is sustainable and a very good primer on the subject is "Fish Tales: Stories & Recipes from Sustainable Fisheries Around the World" by Bart van Olphen and Tom Kime. Whether you get it as a cookbook with a back story or a study of sustainable fishing with some recipes, it most certainly belongs on your bookshelf...

A little sauce...

Accidental Hedonist had a great little post about Eggs Benedict the other day and it got me thinking...

First of all I should say I agree 100% with the AH post and as much as I love Eggs Benedict it is something I simply don't order for breakfast or brunch and when I fail to remember that I am always disappointed. Eggs Benedict is not difficult but it takes a little more work and concentration than most eateries are capable of these days. Face it, in a world where most cafes can't tell the difference between over-easy and scrambled these days, do you really think they can get a sauce right?

Hardly surprising I don't eat out much...

One of the wonderful things about living on a boat and cruising is we can cook whatever we want and be as discerning as needful. Once you have slowed down to a cruising pace being able to bake a cake or do a proper breakfast becomes an enjoyable enterprise rather than a chore.

On the plus side, we can cook and eat on a level that most of us can't afford to back in the real world. Once you master the whole cooking is fun vibe, you really start saving some serious money. Which sort of brings us back around to Eggs Benedict...

While I was shopping for spices the other day I saw that they had some Hollandaise sauce mix and glancing at the price I noted that it was far more expensive than making said sauce from scratch. What's more, in looking at the directions for the ersatz sauce, it seemed to me that there was very little if any savings in time or energy... So why use a sauce mix?

Why indeed!

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 galley gear thought...

I've long been of the opinion that to be happy cooking on boats it is needful to take a step back and think before you try to recreate the sort of kitchen and cooking gear you are accustomed to on land. Which, is not so hard when you consider that most of the gear in your land bound kitchen never ever actually gets used if you are like most people. The trick is not to change the way you cook but to simply take note of how you really cook and the tools you use.

All of us who cook tend to use the same tools all the time and the rest just gets stuck back in a cabinet and waits till the urge to pull them out and do something with them... Face it, when was the last time you used that set of jello molds?

On "So It Goes" I use three pans and a pressure cooker that get constant use and a corner of my galley storage has some pans that never get used so why are they there? The fact is, If I had a huge kitchen with all the room in the world I'd still use those three pans because that is what works.

The point it... You don't really have to change how you cook or what you use simply work out what you don't use and give them to the goodwill or some such and they might actually wind up with someone who will use them (well maybe not those Christmas Jello molds...) but you get the idea!

Pretty much says it all...

Truer words... Seven Things Americans could do better with food

Accidental Hedonist one of our favorite blogs gets it SOOOO right!

A slightly new direction...

We have been getting quite a few requests to beef up the cruising cookbook and living aboard frugally content here at "An Island Gourmand" and while we are happy to oblige it does bring up a misconception about what food on a cruising sailboat should be...

Over and over we hear people talking about cruising cuisine as if it were some sort of dire punishment rather than what it should be... Real Food!

So while we will beef up the cruising content please do not expect us to forgo good food for add a can of this to a can of that and hey presto we have something that almost makes spam edible mish-mash recipes.

Soon come...

Meat Loaf well suited for the day...

I've always loved meat loaf... Even that highly suspect meatloaf that they served at my high school cafeteria with the equally suspicious brown gravy!

Over the years, most of the people I've come across who  make meat loaf take a lot of care and it is more a work of art rather than just baked ground beef. Getting it just right is no easy trick and when it all comes together it is some kind of wonderful! Sadly, with the cost of ground beef getting silly (or if not expensive, then some kind of scary take your chances sort of thing) meat loaf is now more a special occasion sort of meal than a means of cutting costs... How things change!

For a neat take on a special occasion meat loaf check, out Not Martha for some Halloween perfection!

$30 a week...

Some time ago a friend pointed me to a blog called Running With Tweezers as they were in the process of doing a series on no small political import... Namely eating a diet that related to what a too large portion of the USA lives on (the average for people on public assistance spend between $21 and $24 a week on food)... Hence the Eat on $30 project.

It was a good series  and Running With Tweezers is doing it again, read about it!

Shark... It's what's for dinner!

One of the nice things about being on a French island in the Caribbean is they have a very healthy view of what to do with fish of all sorts!

Most folk in the states have eaten shark and ray at one time or another but almost always masquerading as something else.

Sadly with the current decline of the shark population worldwide sooner rather than later there won't be any sharks and it is a shame as shark is not just good eating but a very important part of the food chain and when they go a host of other fish species will as well.