Meals on a trailer sailor

[Thesharonmatic]

Working on an article for the newsletter. How do you plan meals for your boat? How do you store food? How do you cook? How do you do the dishes? What if you are going out for several days to a week? What is your favorite go to meal on your small boat?

[Wolverine]

I dislike the hassle of cooking anywhere, but especially on a boat. I pre-cook a lot of the meals, vacuum seal them, then freeze for at least 3 weeks. On the boat, i place the frozen bags in a pot of water, bring to a boil for 10 minutes, and eat. Hamburgers, brats, and steaks taste fresh off the grill. Works with rice, potatoes, spaghetti, fish, eggs, pancakes, anything. Clean up is fast and easy.

[Charles Brennan]

Kind of an open-ended question, since there are as many meal styles as there are sailboats, and sailing styles.

For day sails, it is mostly just snacks and sandwiches.
For over-nighters, you can go either simple or full on, depending on your culinary mood.
Sometimes, for breakfast I like scrambled eggs, bacon and toast and other times, I'm content with a hard boiled egg, a Mozzarella cheese stick, and a granola bar. 
The difference?
How much time I'm willing to spend on preparation; a longer laid-back cruise is no problem, getting ready for a race, regatta, or raid is a different matter and affects how I approach the prep, cooking and clean-up required.

Lunch depends on what kind of sailing I'm doing.  It's mostly sandwiches or subs; however, on an extended sailing day, such as an all-day regatta or a long distance raid like the Fl 120, I won't take the time to stop and make a sandwich.  I'll just grab some peanut butter and crackers and prepare and eat them, right from the cockpit.
Or, knowing I'll be sailing all day, I might make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the morning, that don't have to be kept in a cooler.  Well . . . . . . Peanut butter and Blackberry Bourbon Pecan jelly; I mean, we're not Philistines!!   

Supper can also run the gamut:
Rib eyes on a grill.
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Grilled Porta Bella mushrooms, with Provolone cheese.
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All the way to simple heated canned food, or freeze-dried boil packets.

The fancier meals I prepare, to entice my wife to go sailing with me.
By myself, or out with a coupla guys, Bratwursts, hot dogs and fried Spam, are more than adequate.
I tend to think of food aboard, as a range going from perishables to non-perishables, depending on the length of the cruise, or if I know I'm going to run out of ice or know I won't be able to obtain ice easily.
And if I'm REALLY all by myself (and feeling lazy!) that's when I break out the canned Sardines and Vienna sausage or dip Doritos right into the Peanut butter! 
(Excuse me a moment, I think my Cardiologist is on the phone . . . . . ) 

THAT is what really informs shipboard menus!! 
Sure I'll start off the first day or two, with steaks or burgers, but then it quickly progresses to more non-perishable foods like hot dogs or brats and (as the ice runs out!) then devolves into canned Spam and Tuna. But even then, you can augment non-perishables with "accessories".
Example: I keep small sandwich or snack-sized baggies with chopped scallions or onions, or celery, in the cooler.
Line the bottom and sides of a bowl with Doritos, pour in some heated canned chili, add the previously chopped onions and some of that shredded cheese that comes in bags, maybe mix in a hot spicy packet from your local taco joint and you now have a far fancier (and more enjoyable!) meal than just heated, canned chili. A few baggies of chopped veggies and bags of shredded cheese, take up far less cooler space.

Same way, with something as simple as a tuna fish sandwich. 
Before I go on a cruise, I hit up all my favorite fast food joints for condiment packets.  Mayonnaise, Ketchup, Mustard, Horsey Sauce (horse radish and mayonnaise), Taco packets in varying degrees of heat, maybe some salad dressings, are all a good way to jazz up boat cooking fare without requiring much space or refrigeration.  Mayonnaise in a jar from home, can spoil quickly; not so, those little packets from your local burger joint.  Mix that in with the tuna, add some chopped celery or onion, from your baggies store and you have a pretty good sandwich. That tuna fish that comes in packets is far more convenient than the more traditional canned tuna, and neither requires any refrigeration.
Make a tuna fish sandwich, using some Horsey Sauce added to the mayonnaise, chopped onions, celery, along with a dash of smoked Paprika and you can fake people out into thinking you're a gourmet, fusion cuisine, chef!   
Even something as mundane as a baloney sandwich, benefits from using honey-mustard salad dressing slathered on the bread.

Seasoning, is always a problem, cruising on small boats; stuff gunks up pretty quickly in the humid boating environment.  Far easier to store smaller amounts in unused (and well-labled!) pill bottles, than dealing with bulky home-use spice containers.  I try to store them in single-use quantities, although that takes a lot more pill bottles.
For reference, I've never had any luck storing spices in sandwich baggies.

Think about ice and cooling degradation, and small fresh ingredients augmentation, along with spice and condiment augmentation and the meals pretty much plan themselves.

Hope this helps,
Charles Brennan

[pgandw]

It helps a lot.  I've done some experimentation with my cooler.  Lined it with Relectix, and fill it with mostly frozen food and drinks - it's good into the 3rd day when everything is thawed in our North Carolina summers.

I'm trying the Outer Banks 130 this year, which is 6 days/5 nights without resupply.  I've thought about the 12/120v freezer/fridges, along with a 160AH LFP battery to keep it going.  But that's a $600 experiment for one trip.  And I'm not sure how well those 12V freezer/fridges do when there is no power.

So I end up eating like a king for 3 nights and into the 4th day - then it all falls apart if I am to abide by my cardiologist's low sodium diet restrictions.

Looking at a second cooler in the cabin for storage of non-refrigerated produce - potatoes, eggs, apples, oranges, onions, bananas, etc - to keep the heat off and make them last longer.

The above makes cooking in the evening and most mornings mandatory, with lunch to be snacks that can be eaten in the cockpit while sailing.  Which also means a 1 burner propane stove and washing a frying pan at a minimum.  Which means a teakettle to heat water for washing and rinsing, and a plastic basin and a dish drying rack.  I use the wash the dish in warm soapy water, then rinse with hot as my camping/boating standard.

I'm finding the logistics for this planned trip to be daunting. The logistics keeps coming in as more difficult to manage than the sailing.

Fred W
Stuart Mariner 19  Sweet P

[Ziradog]

Breakfast for me is coffee & pop-tarts, a tradition from when my kids were little.  I carry snacks for lunch  but lately I have been skipping lunch completely & eating an early supper.  Like Wolverine, I cook ahead & freeze food, and like several pre-cooked brats or Italian sausage are a favorite, as is pre-made taco filling with ramen noodels.  I got weathered in an anchorage for 3 extra days last month was down to canned soup or freeze-dried meals by the time I got back to my home port.  I cook on a one-burner butane stove, and carry but rarely use a small charcoal grill.  I bought a good & over sized Yeti-knockoff cooler and freeze a couple 1-gallon and 2 liter containers of water, and top it up with bagged ice, even in North Carolina I can usually get 5 days out of it.  That's as long as I want to stay out anyway without access to civilization.

[Wolverine]

This spring I bought a 100 qt. Igloo cooler. I have a mold that makes 12lb blocks of ice. On a 2 week trip this past spring, I placed 8 blocks in the cooler, them all the frozen foods on the left, and all the refrigerate foods on the right. Then I poured 20lbs of cubes over the top. The cooler has a drain that I plumbed to the bilge. Returning after 17 days out, the bottom 4 blocks were still about 2" thick. Temps were in the low 80s. I was quite pleased with the results.