Category Archives: Good Eats

Cruising, With a Chance of Chocolate

Posted on by

This week one of my blogging friends, Ellen from Cynical Sailor & His Salty Sidekick, posted on her Facebook page that she had gone several days without any kind chocolate or sugary treat. She was wondering if she could make it an entire week.  Sure you can, Ellen! How do I know?

Because one of the main reasons I was completely successful at keeping my dratted weight under control during our cruise this summer is that I didn’t put any kind of sugar on the boat.  No candy, no ho-ho’s, no sugary muffins, or sweet rolls or anything of any kind. If it had sugar, it just didn’t come onto the boat. If I can do it, anyone can do it. Because sugar is my worst enemy, the enemy I love to hate because I love it so much. I love that powdery white train of death like an addict loves drugs.  Of course, Ellen probably doesn’t need to keep her boat sugar-free. She just had not been to the store lately.

But because I know myself and my lack of sugar-resisting fortitude,  I just didn’t allow it to accompany us on the trip. That’s because once on the boat, it would call my name from the dark recesses of whatever cabinet it was hiding in and I would be powerless under its spell. That’s right, in spite of my attempts to use a Nancy Reagan approach to my drug of choice and ‘Just Say No’, somehow, that never seems to work for me if the demon is in my immediate vicinity and I am bored, tired, sad or have any other kind of human emotion.

A day for chocolate, not sailing.

This is especially true on those rainy days where there is nothing really going on besides laying around reading. I can go through a  whole bag of jolly ranchers or those caramel apple suckers (mmmm) on those days. But boy do I regret that later. So this time, I just bit the bullet and when provisioning I did not indulge in fantasy foods. (Nor in anything that had wheat in it, either, but that’s another story.) And before you feel sorry for Mike, he doesn’t care much about sugar and this lack of sweetness on the boat lost him 10 pounds during the trip. Sometimes I do not understand that man.

No, we saved our treats for going to town, and we limited our town-going days, which we do, anyhow since we always anchor out. I did, however, take a lot of chocolate on the boat. I love chocolate and, pretty much, I want to eat chocolate every day. So I had to figure out how to be able to do that and not let it go to my hips; how to do that in a way that sneaks past the choco-sugarholic in my brain that would eat the entire bag. Or bar. Or whatever just put it in my hands, back away, and no one gets hurt, see?  I have heard that chocolate is good for you. That is a truth I can adopt with relish. So here is how I have chocolate on my boat (and at my house):

This has no sugar. At all.

This has no sugar. At all.

I make my own stevia-sweetened candy using 100% unsweetened cacao, which you buy in the baking department of your local grocery store.  Fortunately, as I’ve eliminated daily sugar from my diet, my taste has turned to dark chocolate from the milk chocolate I used to prefer. Still, completely unsweetened chocolate is an acquired taste. Here are the two ways I use this stuff to satisfy my chocolate craving.

Sugar free Chocolate Bar

(All of these proportions are up for grabs. I never measure anything that I can guestimate)

In microwave (or, on the boat, a double boiler- just improvise it) melt unsweetened chocolate.  Add a little coconut oil – maybe about 1 tsp for two ounces of chocolate. (You can use cocoa butter, but I don’t have any.) Stir it together and sweeten with stevia to taste. Now add nuts, unsweetened dried fruits of your choice, or spices like chili powder or cinnamon. Use your imagination! You can also add peanut butter, but not too much or it won’t get hard again.

After you stir everything together, spread it on a piece of parchment paper, foil, waxed paper, whatever you have that it won’t stick to. Put it in the freezer, fridge, or cooler to harden.  Then eat it up. If you like your chocolate dark, you will never go back to Hershey’s.

Why, yes, Mike did eat these.

PB Chocolate on a Plate

All right, this is sheer laziness but who cares? Take a square of the chocolate. Smear it with unsweetened peanut butter. Sprinkle that with Stevia. (I like Truvia because it sprinkles nicely). Put some Craisins or raisins on top. Yes, Craisins have a little sugar in them. It’s not enough to trigger me, so I can use them on occasion.

You’ll need a napkin for this one but it’s very satisfying.

If you have any other ways to use this unsweetened baking chocolate to satisfy a chocolate craving, bring it on. But leave the sugar out.

 

Stocking Up!

Posted on by

Caution: this post is not about sailing. It’s not even about boats except tangentially. This post deals with a subject dear to Steve Yoder’s heart: food. So far, I’ve avoided writing about food because there have been so many other things to write about. But since we’ve hit a lull in the actual ‘sailing’ department due to the usual weather (read: rain)  in the late fall in this part of the country,  my thoughts turn to how I’ve been filling my time and that’s how the title of this post was born.

Late fall is apple time around here and my neighbors have an apple tree that bore an amazing abundance of fruit this year. I also have a crab apple tree that has never seen a better year than this one. I could not let this nature’s bounty go to waste, so out came the canning supplies.

It’s a little bit of a shame to pick them because they look so pretty on the tree.

 My neighbor and I had made applesauce at her place the night before and in return for my help she gave me a huge box of apples from her tree, so I was in the mood for canning. At the end of the day, I had many jars of pretty fruit we can eat all through the season. I made Pickled Crabapples, Crabapple Jelly, Applesauce sweetened with stevia and spiced with Chinese Five Spice (which I discovered tastes AWESOME on apples) and my own invention of Crabapple Jalapeno butter. I’ve included some recipes for those who have bumper crops of apples or crabapples of their own.

Not bad for a day’s work.

In much of the reading I’ve done about voyaging, canning is one skill that comes up often, especially in books that are older. People eat food all over the world, so I don’t think sailing vagabonds still have to can their own food in preparation for a voyage. But there’s no reason I can’t put some of this stuff on Moonrise now. We use our boat as a little getaway whether we leave the dock or not. I like to keep it stocked with food that will keep a long time, even in the winter. That way if mother nature throws us a curve ball and we need to use the boat as a safe shelter (like if a tree is on our house) we are set to go.

Here are some recipes I used. Isn’t the interweb wonderful?

And here’s my latest creation, which is sort of like a recipe.
                                Melissa’s Crabapple Jalapeno Butter
 You make this with the pulp you have left from making the Crabapple Jelly. It just seems like a waste to throw all that crabby appley goodness away.
First, using the cutting blade on the food processor, process the pulp to a fine paste. Add a little apple juice or water to the pulp to make this easier. You will find that the food processor leaves the seeds intact, as well as the hard pieces found inside the apple core.  Next you want to remove these pieces. Process the pulp through a sieve. If, like me, you don’t have a sieve, you can use a hand held wire strainer. Using your fingers, just press the pulp through the strainer and use a spoon or spatula to scrape the sieved fruit off the bottom. It’s messy and fun and you’ll be left with what looks like baby food applesauce. That’s what you want.

This kind of strainer works just fine. Just use fingers to push the pulp through the strainer.

Add sugar to this, to taste. Add a little lemon juice as well, again, to taste.
Add chopped fresh jalapeno peppers. I use the food processor to chop mine, leaving some of the seeds for extra heat. How much you add depends on how hot you want it. We like peppers, so I added three large jalapenos to about 1.5 cups of pulp.
Now you want to cook this down until it’s thick. Make sure you have added enough liquid so that you will not burn the stuff. You should be able to stir it fairly easily but make it more like porridge than like soup. Cook it on medium heat until it’s about 220F, which should allow it to set up a bit. It’s not jelly so don’t worry too much about this. Just cook it down until you like how it looks and it will stand up to spreading on your choice of carbohydrate.
If you want to can this for the future, use the general guidelines for canning jelly.
I’m imagining this fruit butter served with sharp cheese, like a good sharp cheddar, and some decent crackers. Yum! Oh and wine. There should be wine. If I keep some of this on the boat, I’ll be ready for any social occasion!