Cooking aboard Orion

When Dylan and I were in London still working away in our jobs (o that seems so long ago now!) we decided to do a little experiment. Having read up on cruising life and also speaking to Dylan's parents, we attempted to live on a tinned food diet for a week.

Our usual food intake consisted of no breakfast or maybe some fruit or a muffin bought with our first coffee of the day. For lunch we went to one of the many city lunch hang outs such as Itsu (sushi), Pret a Manger (salad) or Wrap It Up (burrito). For dinner we usually ate around 9 /10pm and always bought the ingredients on the way home from work. Very rarely did we stock up on food, choosing to buy whatever we felt like en route to the flat. Dinner was our thing, the time of day where we dropped everything and stood together in the kitchen, preparing and cooking the food whilst we chatted away about the day. I suppose we had the odd tin of baked beans and bags of pasta and rice if we were feeling lazy but apart from that, our cupboards were permanently empty.

As such, we realised a change in behaviour was needed if we were to adapt to life on a boat! We would need to start putting random ingredients together to make a meal, plan ahead and learn how to keep the fresh fruit and veg fresh for longer. Cue the experiment.

Going along the tinned goods aisle in the supermarket, we were amazed what comes in a tin! Full English breakfast, asparagus, irish stew, hundreds of variety of beans and pulses. Filling our trolley we headed home and started to write a menu combining the non perishable items we now had in the cupboards. Some examples:

• Irish Stew and rice
• Fray Bentos pie
• Chilli con carne, mushrooms and rice
• Garden veg, chunky chicken and rice
• Dessert – pineapple chunks with custard

Now some of the meat tins tasted of dog food (I would rather turn veggie that consume them) but some of the tins were fine, we made a note of the edible versions to pick up when the time came to provision. Needless to say we didn't last a week, craving fresh produce we concluded our experiment and the remaining tins were pushed to the back of the cupboard.

Getting to the Caribbean and going on our first shopping trip, we realised how extreme we were being (although good practice for ocean crossing). Fresh fruit and veg are in abundance here but it does still need planning ahead as if you see it in the shop one day, you can almost guarantee that it won't be there again tomorrow. Writing lists is a thing of the past as you can never rely on the shops being fully stocked, menus are made up on the spot and we try to match items together whilst we push the trolley around.

Our meals now look something like this:

• Cheese, tomatoes and crackers - for lazy days
• Papaya with lime and sugar - breakfast
• Lentil curry - made in the pressure cooker
• Fresh bread and houmous dip
• Calalloo soup
• Fish with cous cous and tomato /onion mix
• Rice and black beans – for days we don't have fresh produce
• Biscuits chucking in any ingredients I may have – bananas, raisins, coconut, peanuts

In the Caribbean sun, our appetites have almost disappeared so one meal a day with fresh fruit in between is more than enough for us. We still maintain that cooking is a 2 person thing on our boat like it was back in the London flat and although the galley is a little small, Dylan and I dance around the tiny space, chopping at an odd angle so the other person can be tending the stove.

Buying the food and cooking it is one thing but the key to all of this is how to store it. Eggs shouldn't go in the refrigerator so we buy them in the stores, then like the egg and spoon race, we carry them in a plastic bag, navigating the other shops, the inevitable stop for a drink, the dinghy ride and the hauling back onto the boat, Hoping we haven't cracked them we keep the eggs in a special egg container that remains at room temperature (so 28 degrees here!). That way they last a lot longer and don't take up any space in the fridge.

Onions can't stay near potatoes, bananas can't stay near anything – Dylan and I play musical chairs with the fruit, moving it about so that they are comfortable with their next door neighbour. All the fruit and veg is washed before it goes in the fridge /hammock to get rid of any bugs. Any cardboard is stripped and left tied tightly in a plastic bag in the cockpit /dinghy whilst the food is transferred to a ziplock bag. This way we are reducing the likelihood of cockroaches that love to lay their eggs in the packaging.

If we are stocking up, this whole process from start to finish takes almost a day! Especially if the main shopping mall is a long bus ride /walk away. We always try and buy the local foods as they are a lot cheaper. Talking to the vendors we try all sorts of weird produce, often trying it out before we decide to buy. Although we miss Whole Foods back in South Kensington (a regular haunt of our on a Saturday morning) we can't help but get wrapped up in the passion of cooking over here. The locals live for their food and speaking to any of the vendors, their eyes light up when they divulge their favourite recipe for breadfruit like morbidly obese Rhonda does in Market Square, St George.

All this talk of food is making me hungry, as I type this, wafts of yeast come my way as a bowl sits on the counter, frothing yeast with water and honey. This morning shall be spent making stove top bread!