Provisioning - Some Hot Tips

by Gill Attersall/MHYC on 22 Aug 2006 A happy crew is a well fed crew, whether that be a bunch of sailors who are there just for the adventure, or a family out for a sailing holiday. The following article is based on a talk given recently by Gill Attersall from Yacht Simple Irresistible to the Middle Harbour Yacht Club:


OVER-PROVISIONING:
You should usually start with a good stock. However, on many journeys there are supermarkets all the way, which are easily accessible, so this leads to the advice to not OVER provision – you don’t want to be eating last week’s lettuce, if there’s a fruiterer a few minutes away on shore.


THE EMERGENCY SUPPLY:
As a precaution against emergencies, we keep 2 to 3 weeks supply of food and water in an area separate to our general food. Once you have this supply, naturally the emergency won’t happen!

THE BUCKET METHOD OF FOOD STOWAGE:
On ‘Simply Irresistible’ we have two shelves in our galley area where we can put six numbered buckets – we have a list on the back of the door of what is kept in each bucket so we don’t drive ourselves mad pulling buckets out & trying to remember where we put the boredom-pacifying Mars Bars. Our buckets at the moment go:
1) Cereal/Porridge/Sweet Biscuits/Muesli Bars/fruit cake
2) Nibbles Savoury Biscuits/ Nuts,
3) Rice/Pasta/Couscous/Ryvita
4) General tins/tinned salmon/baked beans/veggies/fruit
5) Cooking Oil, Soya & other Sauces there are great ones out that you can just add
to pasta/tinned salmon to make a yummy meal.
6) Spare Tea/coffee/longlife milk/orange juice/cake/muffin packets.

Outboard of the boxes goes our bread mix which you can get at the supermarket in either white or wholemeal and which is easy to mix and cook up either in an oven or in a Bar-b-q. The mountain bread (comes in White, wholemeal, rye, corn, gluten free) is kept in the chart table, of course, to keep it flat between the charts. And fresh bread under our navigation seat where it won’t get squashed.

Our fridge takes 3 buckets, which we can lift out:
· The least accessible one near the back holds beer/white wine/kryovac meat –
· Next one is fruit and veggies that need refrigerating
· And most accessible bucket butter/cheese/fruit juice/dips/yoghurt, etc.

Tea, coffee, handy ocean-going spreads like peanut butter/jam/marmalade are kept with our mugs and glasses on a shelf over the galley which has the non-slip
plastic to stop mugs and jars clanking about on a rolley anchorage, this is behind
Perspex sliding doors so nothing can fall out and break.

KEEPING A SHOPPING LIST:

We keep an on-going shopping list in a book in the chart table so if one of us
sees something getting a bit low we write it down straight away as there is nothing worse than setting off to sea for a week knowing you forgot something essential like teabags or worse the red wine –

Hardware items are allowed on this list so long as they don’t take over!

DOING THE SHOPPING:

We usually walk/get the bus, and get a taxi back to the boat with our shopping - some marinas even have a bus which goes into town for you, and it’s worth checking this out.
Take a ‘cooler’ backpack for cheese/butter and other refrigerated items.

So to plan a shop we try to cater for:
· Luxury meals (nothing like a nice roast leg of lamb with roast potatoes & mint
sauce tucked up in a bay all to yourself or sharing with new friends),
· Regular meals - there is no reason why you can’t eat basically what you prepare at home, be it cereal for breakfast or what you usually have for lunch/dinner
· Easy to warm/serve meals for rough at sea weather say pre-prepared in port or at home (we often just leave one-pot stews in the saucepan and tape the lid on to stop spillage) or tinned mince with peas & pasta that you can warm in one pot & eat out of a bowl
· Really rough emergency food, which once you have got you won’t need i.e. 1-
minute noodles/Cup-a-Soups/Baked Beans/Peanut butter/vegemite for
sandwiches. A chunk of fruit cake/muesli bars are good to keep in your wetweather pocket for energy/boredom. I believe the tough ‘foredeck gorillas’ keep jellied snakes in their pockets for the glucose!

Once we went on one journey for eight days with two nearly teenage boys who ate like gannets and because we were on a tight schedule we didn’t really want to shop stop at all on the way.
On this occasion we actually laid out on the carpet in our living room at
home the individual meals and kept a note of what went with what, then improvised – as you do! But at least we knew how long it a all should last.

CRYOVAC/VACUUM PACK:

Many butchers will Cryovac any meat you want for a small extra charge and of
course you can buy legs of lamb, chicken, ham steaks bacon, sandwich meats,
sausages vacuum packed at the supermarket. Meat will last forever if kept cool - under 5 degrees - and you don’t puncture the packing (keep in a container in the fridge in case it is punctured & bleeds) – Rump steak is even more tender cryovaced.
With the boys we served it as steak, cooked extra for sandwiches, stir-fried – we easily got through a whole rump. The only failure we had was to get some pork in a plum sauce cryovaced and of course the plum sauce fermented and blew up like a balloon.

FRUIT AND VEGETABLES:
We keep fruit and veggies that don’t need refrigerating up for’d in a net in the shade near the for’d hatch for ventilation i.e. apples, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, ordinary cabbage.
If you can keep below the waterline aired it probably would be better for keeping cool. The rest get wrapped in kitchen paper and put into Green Bags which will keep for up to 3 weeks.
Just peel off the outer leaves of cabbages and lettuces to keep them longer. We will often use cabbage/carrot/apple grated with mayonnaise as coleslaw instead of lettuce as it keeps better. Chinese cabbage is a good replacement for lettuce, and you can use it in your stir-fries. I sometimes add tinned Chinese veggies to fresh veggies for bulk.
If doing a long leg you can cook up a couple of meals, say a hotpot stew and
Bolognaise beforehand and make sandwiches up for the day to be kept in the fridge.

RICE:
We use Doongara Clever Rice, as it is low G.I., cooked by absorption method, in
12 mins. We often throw veggies on top of the rice (say carrots & Broccoli) to steam, thereby saving washing another saucepan. However, there are only two of us. We’ll often chop an onion & add a chicken stock cube/coconut essence to the rice /couscous for a different flavour.

MOUNTAIN BREAD:
Mountain bread can be used as a roll up with any amount of vegetation with cheese/meat or as a pizza base or baked as biscuits for dips and keeps for months.

MILK AND CHEESE:
We find UHL and dried milk fine as a back-up to fresh milk, and you might not
choose to eat processed cheddar cheese at home but its fine if you are out of Blue Brie, grilled with tomato makes a nice lunch. Long life juices are easy to store.

Don’t make too many compromises! if, like us, you don’t like eating off plastic, get the Corelle Non-breakable plates, ours is now 17 years old, looks as good as new, even though its been through a bit of weather we have only broken one bowl when a hatch was slammed shut on it.

If you like good coffee get a plunger. We like to drink out of glasses, which get locked away on passages - you can wrap a towel round glass and keep it in a plastic bag in case it does get broken.

IN THE COCKPIT:
We keep water in the cockpit for easy sips all the time when sailing, we try to
remember to apply sunscreen morning and lunch time and keep headache pills easily accessible in the chart table so we don’t have to drag out the medical box for just a little nagging headache which often you ignore but makes you feel a little ‘o