Today is our two week anniversary of this passage and we are celebrating by clicking off the miles under sail, in the right direction. Even the sun is shining for us and the further west we go the warmer the weather gets. I am back to wearing shorts. Hoo rah! We have had a few very slow days due to light and variable winds; the kind where just when you get the sails up again and give a sigh of relief at turning off the engine, the winds die to nothing and the sails flog themselves to an early death. The motion of the boat has been horrendous and yesterday we made less than 100 miles. Ugh. So slow. This makes days like today even sweeter; may it last for hundreds of miles. Tomorrow we will have less than 1000 miles to go.

Anyway, I have time and energy to give potential cruisers an update on some of these galley tricks I have tried. Turns out I have learned a lot about preparing for this long kind of passage making. Let’s get the failures out of the way first.

1. Fresh cilantro in oil. TERRIBLE. Awful. So disappointing. Next time I will try freezing. If you tried this idea because you, too, were excited about the prospect of preserving cilantro, sorry.

2. Bimbo Bread Pudding. In Mexico they sell this stuff that’s basically bread-shaped-foodlike stuff made with a lot of preservatives and then dried. They call this toast. I call it a giant tender crouton. But since you use dried bread to make bread pudding I thought why not give it a try? I will save you the trouble by asking if you think bread crumb pudding sounds wonderful. If so, then by all means go buy some 99 cent Bimbo toast and go to it. Crumbs held together with what should be custard but somehow isn’t. I am over this experiment.

3. Storing sweet potato sourdough pancake mix in the fridge to use another day. Nope. The word ‘sour’ is under used here. Your mouth will pucker and your eyes will water. Then the fish will be fed, one way or another. Word.

4. Using the pressure cooker to make a casserole using packaged potatoes au gratin, sliced up chicken apple sausages, and frozen broccoli. Delicious sounding on paper, this does not translate well to the plate and is, in fact, a disaster. My crockpot would have made it delicious but…

5. My crockpot, the mainstay of my cooking while cruising, has been all but useless on this passage, leaving me at a loss for how to make so many of our favorite recipes. I must use the inverter to run it and because we don’t have enough sun, even on a good day, to keep the batteries topped up with solar power, the engine must be on. That’s because our boat is always facing the same direction right now and generally at least half of our panels are shaded one way or another. Also the crockpot does not have a locking lid. And this is how our African Sweet Potato Stew ended up on the floor a couple of weeks back. I miss this simple and effective galley tool and am working on a solution to that lid problem.

As an aside, I now use my pressure cooker all the time. But it just doesn’t do everything well and I am still learning how to make best use of it.

I will save the next post for the galley wins.

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