In college my roommate received a cookbook from his parents called "A Man, a Can, a Plan." It was a bachelors guide to cooking that used a can of food as the basis for every meal. This is pretty much our approach to cooking on the boat. Except with three dudes on the boat, we have to use a couple of cans and generally don't have a plan except trying to use what we have a lot of. Most of this time this means canned beans. We have an entire cubby hole under a bench devoted entirely to canned beans.
Lately however some of our cans have been rusting. Most of the time these are cans that are left over from the original provisioning in Virginia. The reason they are left over is that no one wants to eat them. Our solution to this problem is to eat them all at once which leads to some weird combinations such as spinach-sauerkraut-olives-tuna-chili. One of the worst cans to eat is the Great Value Salmon in a can. (I'm calling you out Wal-Mart.) Every time I eat it I can picture the scene of the canning factory in my head. Some burly Alaskan dude with a beard puts an aluminum ring around a salmon, cuts off the head and tail and puts the caps on. The salmon is canned with scales, bones and all. It's pretty gross.
The other thing about cooking on the boat is that when we make something, we make a lot of it. This means we eat it for breakfast lunch and dinner and maybe breakfast again if we are not done. It's only hot once. If the cooking is a failed experiment of dubious food combination, well, you get to taste that experiment more than a couple of times just to make sure you don't like it.
Before I came on the boat I didn't really enjoy soup or stew. I didn't understand how someone could take a perfectly good cut of meat which could be fried, pan seared, grilled, broiled, or baked and decide to put it in boiling water instead. It just seemed wrong to me somehow. Well I can now honestly say that I've warmed to the concept. Some of our best meals on the boat have started with a can of clam chowder. I can't yet say I'm a total fan but that is mostly because of the difficulty of eating soup in 20ft swells on deck with a moonless night. I think I ate more seawater than soup.
Eating the same thing over and over on the boat gets old quickly so we take every chance we can get to try new food at the places we visit. We have met some very generous people here in the Marquesas who we have had dinner with as well as buying food from vendors.
Some of the highlights have been:
Poisson Cru- This is raw fish served polynesian style with a coconut sauce. It doesn't look very appetizing when you first see it but looks are deceiving because it is delicious with a slightly salty/sweet balance.
Goat meat- These high islands are teeming with goats. Some are tame and owned by people but most are wild and live up in the mountains. Goat reminds me a lot of mutton and you would expect it to be a little tough, but the Marqueseans seem to cook it low and slow with a lot of spices. Think of dry rub ribs where the meat falls off the bone. Thats what this is like.
Baguettes with meat and french fries - I was floored when we first had these on Hiva Oa. They seemed to be everything you could ask for after a long sea voyage. Fresh french baguette? check. Copius amount of french fries? check. Large tender slices of grilled pork sausage? check. Top that off with mayo and BBQ sauce and you have a meal I would have been dreaming about on the way here if I knew it had existed.
Besides these highlights, there is plenty of great french wine, cheese and bread as well as fresh fruits, juice, and fresh fish. I haven't had a dish yet I didn't like but I'm already looking forward to the other islands. We've heard that on Tahiti there is a hot dog van that serves T-bone steak. I guess thats what I'll be dreaming about from here to there.