Extreme Cooking and Dining

So, what do you eat on the boat? Like canned food and more canned food? No, not really. On our first trip from Tahiti to Tuamotus and back, my friend and sailing mentor Karissa tells me that “you can cook anything you would cook at home, just depends how much time and effort you want to put into it”.

So here we are throwing a Thanksgiving dinner in the open ocean:

On our Tahiti-Hawaii crossing, we discover early on our trip that all French men are gourmet cooks. If two out of two happen to be, it is only logical that the rest should be.  Also, I dated one. He did not cook for me but was good at critiquing.

Of course, we do eat fresh fish. The only problem is we must catch it ourselves.

Oh, and clean it.

The final result is usually something like this:

Arnaud cooks the bonito like a proper French chef – with passion, deep concentration, and very fast. Probably with some famous French sauce. Then he asks me if it looks good. “Presentation is very important”, he chirps. Duh, I thought it looked good enough to eat when the fish was still on the hook. I need to revisit my European upbringing.

I volunteer to make a salad and Pierre says that this is enough food and it is not good to overeat, but he will make an exception for a salad. I send a humble reminder to myself that back in the US we eat like pigs and drink like fish.

Pierre is making bread. From scratch. Not that we ran out of bread and have started gluten withdrawals. Just because it is the French way. Or Pierre’s way.

The next day he makes two loaves of bread. Here I learn a new French word “miche (de pain)”. Turns out that it is the same word for breasts. Go figure. I wonder if I should start wearing Jim’s t-shirts.

Cooking takes some readjustment on the boat. First of all, I don’t have my collection of cookbooks. Second, I can’t google recipes. Luckily, there is the Iridium GO! email. Would you like to use a lifeline and phone a friend in Seattle?

“Lauraaaaaa”, I send an email somewhere into the galaxy (satellite), “can you google a recipe for the oatmeal-raisin cookies, please?” And then patiently wait.

“How about the raspberry-oatmeal bars?”

“Can one make quesadillas with canned tuna?” – I ask Jim at the beginning of the trip. Jim says don’t even mention that, he will throw up.

“Lauraaaaaaasaaa, can you find if there is such a thing as tuna quesadillas?” A week later- fantastic quesadillas. Tuna, mayo, salsa.

Pierre teaches me how to make poisson cru (the national dish of Tahiti) and serves it with couscous.

One morning Jim comments about me sleeping for a couple of hours in the cockpit during rough seas and some rain until my shift started. I tell him that I was determined to keep the dinner in my belly because it was that good and the only way to ensure that, was in a horizontal position with my eyes closed.

Cooking / galley lessons learned:

• Overripe breadfruit resembles durian, only you get a lot more bang for your buck. Sans the stench. Fry it. Yum!
• Soggy rice cakes, ginger-honey cookies, and stale old bonbons in a ratty beat up Ziploc bag are high in demand during night watches. Who knows how long the candy has been in our pantry in Seattle and the presence of two red-foiled Hershey kisses makes me question which Christmas their official birthday was. I have a suspicion that carbon dating would point to the Obama era.
• Learned some French slang.
• Fresh hot bread is a morale booster.
• French liver pate tastes great even from the cans.
• We must not have any livers in the US to make canned pate de foie.
• Those French even have perfect canned peeled potatoes.
• The French chefs, pardon, sailors are impressed with our canned cheese that has a shelf-life of 30 years and tastes delicious.

• When your husband gets busted for smuggling biscottis for his night shift and you ask him if they are for fattening (a reference to the movie Golden Kingdom) and he responds “no, for awakening”, you must trust him because he knows his Buddhism stuff.
• When you get busted for smuggling canned pears for your night shift, your husband is curious why would you bring canned beans for snacking at night.
• You NEVER season your food with ground pepper in a cockpit on a moving boat. And especially do not allow your spouse to do that.  A teary-eyed evening for me.
• You do NOT let your spouse bring the whole bottle of red wine for dinner. Somehow it hoses me down and ruins my good clothes. The cockpit looks like a site of a bloody massacre the next day.
• And the most important – three hot meals a day is a guarantee to keep your crew’s morale high.

Lessons Pierre learned from me – only one – you can bang a jar on the counter and then unscrew the lid effortlessly.