In our home we love to eat fresh, from scratch, home cooked meals with the best ingredients available or the best we can afford. We tend to eat simple meals but with lots of flavor. I don’t go overboard with spices, but use lots of natural flavors like garlic, onion, ginger, celery, parsley, cilantro and the like and then mostly use Celtic or Himalayan salt and freshly ground black pepper.
I’ve started cooking for our home when I was in grade six and even had family come over and request certain meals I’ve made before. I later took a Domestic Science class for three years where I learned most of the kitchen basics, cuts of meat, preparation methods for different kinds of food and so on. I’m definitely not a chef, but rather a very good home cook with a good knowledge of nutrition and health.
When we started cruising on our small 32ft boat in 2011, I decided that we would not compromise on our meals and our eating habits. Neither my husband nor I like fast foods and do not eat out much at all. We both enjoy cooking and enjoy experimenting with new flavors and methods of cooking, so we did our provisioning with “home cooking” in mind.
I’ve been doing canning for about half a century, but was afraid of glass on the boat and off course the weight and space the jars would take up, was a concern. The only canned foods I dared take along were my homemade jams, pickles, relishes and some canned tomato sauce.
For living on a boat, I thought that dehydrated foods were the better option in terms of weight and space that it took. At first I tried drying vegetables in the oven and for some products, especially leafy greens, it worked ok. The first potatoes I dried were a complete failure, but later I tried blanching them before I dried it and that worked a little better, but I eventually gave up and took instant potatoes instead. Other vegetables like carrots, green beans, sweet potatoes and broccoli worked ok, but it didn’t rehydrate well and the taste was a bit disappointing. I wasn’t going to throw it away, so I vacuum sealed and stowed it away. I felt that although the end product was not exactly to my standards, it was ok and at least we’ll have food to eat. As so many other new cruisers find out, there were to our surprise food available everywhere we went on that first trip, so we definitely would not have starved:-)
Unfortunately, much of the vacuum sealed vegetables were not completely dry when I stored it and one by one they molded as I pulled them out to use. We lost at least a third of the “dried” food we brought on that first trip. At least many lessons were learned and I kept on researching new and better ways to preserve food.
In 2012 we bought a bigger boat – a 41ft Morgan Out Island (monohull) and I felt as if we could dance in all the space we suddenly had available. I then went back to my trusted canning of food and even bought a proper food dehydrator and I was back in business.
I canned my usual vegetables, fruit, jams, pickles and relishes, and then learned about pressure canning meat, butter and cheese. This again was a learning curve, but as long as I stuck to the instructions and correct pressure and time in the canner, everything turned out pretty good.
We now had the extra luxury of having “instant” meals ready and we would jokingly call it our “fast foods”. For stews we just needed to cook some rice and you had a proper meal and with the soups, I normally had freshly baked bread on board, so that also turned to a complete meal within a few minutes.
I definitely had more success with the Dehydrator than I did with the oven. Again, all the leafy greens worked very well and when I’m ready to use it, I would cook potatoes and onions with salt and pepper, add the dried greens, mash it all up, add some butter and salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste and had a delicious and nutritious side dish. The other favorite was to add a little bit of the spinach, longevity spinach or beet greens to rice while I’m cooking the rice for extra nutrition and flavor. Mushrooms were definitely a favorite and we would add it to many dishes and even if it remained somewhat chewy, we didn’t mind it at all. It added a lovely umami flavor to rice, eggs or sauces and gravies. Mango and pineapple dried pretty well and we would eat it right out of the bag as a snack. Berries didn’t do well in my opinion. They turn rock hard and would never reconstitute to a “normal” berry again. The only thing that worked for me, was to grind them up into a powder and use the powder in yogurt, smoothies or mixed into my home-made kefir for a delicious drink. I later made some fruit roll-ups in the Dehydrator with berries and that was definitely a favorite – even as gifts. The nice thing is that I can still control what goes into the fruit, in other words, only a little bit of sugar to help with the preservation and nothing else. These roll-ups stored well for about one year without any preservatives and that for me, proves my point that all the preservatives that is used in commercially prepared food is totally unnecessary.
Another method of food preservation that I really like is fermenting. Fermented foods are preserved using an age-old process that not only boosts the food’s shelf life and nutritional value, but can give your body a dose of healthy probiotics, which are live micro-organisms crucial to healthy digestion. Anytime we got to a fresh market or to someone who sold vegetables from their garden, we would buy some, and what we couldn’t eat fresh, I immediately fermented and enjoyed later on the trip. The fermented veggies are a replacement for pickles. Pickles are not necessarily bad for you if made from scratch, but the fermented veggies have added probiotics and nutrition and it tastes great. I have pickles as well as fermented veggies on board and a few times I did a blind test with guests, and 9 times out of 10 the fermented veggies will win the taste test.
Our favorite drink on board is either water Kefir or Kombucha. Kefir is a fermented drink made from Kefir grains, sugar (for the fermenting process) and lemon. Kombucha is a fermented tea, and is made with a scoby, tea and sugar. Both drinks can be prepared as a fizzy or a flat drink, depending on your preference.
The latest “gadget” that we acquired is a freeze-dryer. I didn’t think that we needed yet another appliance, but the more I read and studied the process and the preservation of nutritional value, the more I got interested. Well, that is all history now and our freeze-dryer basically works 24/7. In one of my other blogs I go into more detail about it, but suffice to say, I am totally impressed.
With all this said, I still believe that you won’t eat much differently on your boat when cruising than you do at home. I would however encourage anyone to take this opportunity of living such a great, healthy, privileged life on the water, to seriously look at their eating habits and do a little research about the “poison” that goes into a lot of the food that are sold in grocery stores. Once you get the hang of it, preparing food from scratch is actually not as time consuming as people make it out to be, and the taste is amazing and best of all, your health will improve as you get rid of the toxins you’ve been feeding yourself.