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Food
by
Kate and Hamish Laird
Funny that the assignment to write about food would come just as I am beginning the process of provisioning for our trip to Greenland this summer. I'm in slight shock about it, because it's bigger quantities than I've ever had to deal with before - we'll average 6.8 people on board (counting Helen and Anna as one) for nearly 100 days - or 683 crew days if I add it all up precisely. Certainly, we'll be able to restock in Greenland, but I don't know what is readily available. From what I've been told, it can be hit or miss - the "Lonely Planet Guide" describes finding mangoes and pineapples in the store, but no onions. And the areas we're most interested in aren't the big towns with supermarkets.
As a starting point, I have a computer program that Hamish wrote many years ago, based on years of expedition sailing to Antarctica. You enter the number of crew (and their nationalities) and number of days, and it spits out a two-page shopping list. It is fine tuned for six-week trips with eight people; longer or shorter trips need a bit more brainpower, though if I am organized this year, I may be able to come up with a good shopping list for 683 crew days - but that means I need to keep careful records of what I buy now. I am promising myself I will do that, but as the deadlines draw near, we'll see how thorough I can be.
Here is a sampler:
There is no way I am going to fit all this on the boat. And the numbers used to make the calculations are a bit fuzzy - they're designed to always have a bit left over after a month-long trip, so these figures have 3 "leftovers".
My shopping list will probably look like this:
The Sorting:
We are very lucky to be moved into my parents' barn at the moment. There is a lot of floor space. I can't imagine trying sort the food for 7 people for 4 months on board the boat; you'd have to do it very slowly. When we were sailing to Antarctica, I was able to come into port, do an inventory, make a list, visit the three major grocery stores in town, the butcher, and order vegetables from the wholesaler and pack the boat in 3 days, 2 in a pinch. But it was much more of a known quantity: I knew more or less what would be offered in each grocery store, one had vacuum-packed cheese, one had vacuum-packed salami, another sold boxed wine. All three would run out of Ziploc bags at the same time (actually, come to think of it, none of them sold Ziplocs the first year I was there), but it was still easy provisioning.
The most trying provisioning encounter I had was while two months pregnant with Helen. We were stocking up in Punta Arenas, Chile, and I wasn't familiar with the stores. The thought of food made me quite ill, and I needed to pick up 8 weeks worth for 8 people. I trotted into the supermarket, and the first thing I came to was the lamb. Up until the previous year, I'd been a vegetarian for 17 years (love definitely can change one's habits). So I picked up a cordero and tossed it in the cart. Googly eyes watched my every move as I went around the shop, head lolling out over the rim of the basket. I finally abandoned that cart and started in on another. When I came back to the boat, I found Hamish and told him, "The food's in the taxi. Deal with it.".
I don't know if I will be able to find a lamb in St. John's, Newfoundland, with or without head, but that was always a favorite in South America. We tied it to the gantry, and let the Southern Ocean waves salt-cure it. But, it's probably a bad idea to tie a carcass to the gantry in polar bear country, anyway; I'll haul out the vacuum sealer and throw the meat into the bilge.
We don't have refrigeration.
I'll leave
that sentence up there on its own to make sure you read it. No one can
believe us, and we couldn't either, really, when it was 108 degrees in
Belize this winter. But certainly in Maine and points north, where the
water is cold, we don't miss it. And in Greenland and Antarctica, there
is plenty of ice for gin and tonics. I think if we do go back to Belize
(and we hope to in a couple of years) we will get some sort of cooler
system, but for now we are happy without it.
One reason for not having refrigeration is we prefer to sail in high latitudes
- where the seawater is 33 degrees, there's no need for refrigeration.
But we also don't want to become slaves to Meat in the Freezer. As a lapsed
vegetarian, this is probably an easier philosophy for me, but Hamish,
as the guru of all things mechanical on board, is just as happy not to
have another system to maintain. And we dislike the idea of having to
be home at a certain time to run the freezer. If we are not aboard much,
the batteries last for days without recharging; we'd have to run the charger
just to keep the freezer going.
Vacuum packing is very good. Cheese is where it really pays off. Good cheese can be incredibly hard to find, and if it is cut into small pieces and vacuumed sealed it lasts really well. In Belize it sweated and mushed and wasn't hard enough to grate, but it never went bad. Meat also does well with vacuum packing. Ours runs off the inverter and I use it on our desk or in the galley. Oats and rice pack well too, and don't get little bugs in them. Pasta is too pointy; it breaks the vacuum bags. I reuse flour, rice, and oat bags but throw out cheese and meat bags after one use.
Salami lasts for a long time if you buy it unsliced. In Argentina, we used to be able to buy enormous tenderloins vacuum packed; sometimes lamb is sold that way in our local supermarkets.
In Belize, a friend told us the secret of preserving cilantro: buy a huge bunch, add olive oil and garlic and salt and turn it into pesto. It was so delicious we never had a chance to see how long it lasted before going bad. I plan to make up a lot of it before we leave New Hampshire.
One of the problems with provisioning in the US is that all the produce has been refrigerated, and doesn't last nearly as long as it does when you buy it unrefrigerated. A friend planted her garden early and hopefully, with a few of the green long life bags, we'll have lettuce for the first couple of weeks. Garden lettuce lasts easily twice as long as store-bought.
One of the joys of Seal is she has a full larder. Chuck Paine, her designer, kept saying we really ought to have a second head in there, but we put the second head in the forepeak and kept the larder. It is fantastic. My father-in-law built the shelving - ten shelves, five on either side, sized to fit big plastic crates. For the most part, I use Rubbermaid "Slide N Stack" baskets, which have holes on the side for ventilation, but a solid base to catch oozing zucchini and spilled vanilla extract.
I also use a similar basket from Sterilite; the Rubbermaid is much higher quality, but the aft shelves aren't deep enough for the 20" Rubbermaid baskets. We also have several crates and "open head drums" from http://www.usplastics.com. Now the question is where to put it all. We have never attempted to put so much food on a boat.
Hamish built racks in the forepeak to take two 24X14X16-inch crates. These will house potatoes and carrots and cabbage. All of these like a humid environment; the potatoes like temperatures of 40-45 degrees F, carrots and cabbage 32-35. It won't be that cold (provided the boat heater keeps working!). Potatoes do best unwashed and in the open, carrots seem to do best in plastic perforated bags. Cabbage I generally leave out if it is uncut.
Onions are a pain. They shouldn't be stored near potatoes; they should have dry, cold (32-35) and plenty of air circulation. They don't like to be stored in a heap; they should be in shallow layers. Yeah right. In Antarctica, we stored them in the unheated dog house, but that dry, dry air is unlike the eastern seaboard or, I suspect, Greenland. The driest air is inside the boat. But cold? I am going to try on the sole of the larder; it should be fairly cold down there, but dry from the heater.
Apples are worse. They give off fumes that cause other fruits and vegetables to ripen (i.e. rot) faster. (If you have rock hard pears or other fruits, you can hasten them along by putting them in a paper bag with an apple.) And of course, "one rotten apple spoils the bunch," isn't some old wives' tale. The best way we've found to store them is to buy them in the cardboard boxes they are shipped in (yes I know, but cockroaches aren't really a problem in the high latitudes), which have cardboard "shelves" with apple-shaped dimples in them. The apples don't touch one another, and if one rots, the cardboard absorbs the ooze. Keeping them cool (32-40) and dry is another matter; we're going to try the ski locker. I try to check the apples regularly, but I am too lazy; I seldom look much deeper than the first layer or so.
Winter squash is the best. It keeps better than anything else I know, even cabbage. Its favorite is 50-55, moderately dry. I think I'll keep this in the larder, but there won't be room for it all. It does well almost anywhere; it's just a question of remembering where you put it...
Eggs need a safe, secure spot. (I will never forget the sight of six dozen eggs arcing overhead as a boat I was working on fell off a wave.) I keep good cartons (the clear plastic ones that come with organic eggs in the US last very well, and do double duty as paint trays for preschoolers) and if we buy eggs in cardboard or Styrofoam I swap them to the plastic cartons. We regularly kept eggs for six weeks unrefrigerated in the Antarctic. I turned the cartons once a week, and I never bothered water testing them before opening them, but I do always take the precaution of cracking them into a small bowl one at a time, so as not to spoil the whole recipe if there is a bad one. I've only ever had one really rotten egg and that was at home with a box of eggs I'd picked up at the local supermarket the day before.
Hamish spent an hour in the workshop today, dust mask on, mixing flour. He is the baker aboard, so after mixing 40 pounds of whole wheat, 20 pounds of white, 10 pounds of rye and two boxes of gluten, he bagged up 44 batches of 690 grams each. I'll vacuum seal four together in one pack and they will be stored in the lazarette in the open head barrels (despite the name they have a very good lid. Not totally air tight, but good enough.) Pasta, oats, and rice will go back here, as well as the third round of cans.
Most everything has three or more locations: the larder, under Hamish's and my bunk, and a deep storage site. This morning Helen and Anna helped me tally our dried fruit packets and we divided it into four piles: larder, month 2, month 3 and month 4. I have 9 crates for miscellaneous pieces, and organize it by months, so there are gingersnaps left over at the end. We are not grown up enough to have it all in sight. Goodies have to be buried at the bottom of the bunk, or they wouldn't last the first passage.
If someone had told me the day I met Hamish that seven years later we'd have two kids and an expedition boat, I might have been able to imagine it, but I certainly never would have believed I'd be someone who could eat beef jerky.
You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.
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