Cooking While Cruising - Best Recipes

Cooking and eating are a big part of our cruising experience on our catamran, Light Wave. Much to my surprise, I have become far more creative while cooking on board. I have the time, and we carry lots of baking ingredients, dried legumes, rices, dried milk, olive oil, cooking oil, mayonnaise, mustard (dry and bottled), wasabi, nori and spices in addition to our fresh produce (potatoes, cooking onions, garlic, fresh ginger, yams, carrots, tomatoes chosen while not ripe, and cabbage last really well,
but Romaine and head lettuce, green peppers and zucchini are wonderful for the first 8 days of crossing) and canned goods to make cooking and baking a fun adventure. Some of the recipes here came from my own library of recipes or from my cruising-activated imagination; others were given to me by fellow cruisers, whom I will mention in the recipe. The key to cooking on board is to shake it down, loosen up, and relax with your cooking. You’re sailing! Have fun!

It’s also important to get to know your oven so that you can properly pre-heat it for baking, which is far more susceptible to failure at incorrect temperatures, and keep it on the right temperature through the baking process. I preheat our Force 10 oven by turning on both the oven and the broiler propane rings until the temperature goes up to the maximum setting, allowing it to sit there for a couple of minutes. Then I turn off the broiler and watch the gauge as the temperature slowly drops, adjusting the oven burner incrementally up and down to reach about 100 degrees F. more than the recipe calls for before putting the food in the oven as the oven is going to lose 75-100 degrees as soon as you put cold stuff into it. You have to watch it closely for the first little while, and keep making those minute adjustments until the oven temperature steadies at the desired temperature. Even then, you have to check it every 5 or 10 minutes.

Before we left on our Sailing Adventure, loving friends gave us a Kuhn-Rikon Pressure Cooker, and I gradually acquainted myself with the mysteries and joys of pressure cooking. It’s really simple, and keeps the nutritional value in foods as you cook them, plus it’s quicker. In addition, the heavy weight of a Kuhn-Rikon cooker keeps it on top of the stove. We don’t have a gimbaled stove on Light Wave, just a 3/4-inch lip on front of the stove and a couple of fiddles (which cannot fit around a pressure cooker), and had no problem.

Some of the links below are under construction and will be finished soon but here are some of our favorite recipes from Light Wave’s galley:

• Aussie Chocolate Cake (using canned beets)
• Baking Powder Biscuits
• Banana Bread (with or without chocolate chips)
• Corn-Potato Chowder
• Fish Marinade, the simple way
• Irish Freckle Bread
• Mud Cake (Chocolate cake without eggs)
• No-Chocolate Chippers (chocolate chip cookies without the chocolate).
• One Pot Rice-Bean Pilaf
• Pita Bread
• Sushi on Board
• Vegetarian Chili
• Vegetarian Lasagne
• Vegetarian Pizza
• Yams Oriental

*Note: “Vegetarian” here does not mean “without cheese.”