Rainy Day – Meal Planning

August 17, 2022

The weather in Maine this summer has been wonderful but dry. That is not in itself remarkable, but it is next to impossible for me to do inside things when the weather just demands that I be outdoors. If it’s nice, we’re out. Nature is glorious here, but the summers are short so given the option on a pretty day of being at the computer meal planning or climbing Mount Katahdin, well, you know what wins. It was a blessing in many ways that we finally had a rainy day today, and I could get to all those things I put off for such an opportunity, like meal planning.

I wasn’t too sure how to get to a shopping list to eventually fill the boat with food except to create a rough outline of the process I’ve seen before as crew on other voyages and estimate what our provisioning requirements might be for the length of time we’d be at sea. Breakfast and lunch would be easy; the crew will be on their own. But dinners are a more special time for a crew. It is an opportunity during a 24-hour watch schedule to be together, share a prepared meal, and socialize a bit. The anticipated time at sea on the leg from Hampton, VA to Antigua is 14 days. I added a 150% safety margin just in case the winds don’t cooperate, so we need to plan provisions for 21 days. (I also have a week’s supply of Mountain House dehydrated meals as a backup and for when the weather is too rough to spend a lot of time in the gally preparing.) Secondly, I sent a form to our crewmembers for that leg asking if they had any dietary restrictions or preferences so I wouldn’t plan on something a crewmember couldn’t eat. Then, and maybe most importantly, it is an absolute imperative that meals be interesting! Canned chili with fresh onions will work once but won’t make for a happy crew if often repeated.

I found a great collection of interesting and simply prepared meals in Lynn and Larry Pardey’s book “The Care and Feeding of the Offshore Crew,” go figure! Armed with a dozen or so recipes from the Pardeys coupled with a few of my own and, as my father often said kiddingly, viola (voilà). Next steps were to list all the required ingredients for the entire meal plan in an Excel spreadsheet and create a shopping list from that. Reflecting now on the process, it seems a little OCD like but as a friend of mine once said after describing a foible of his own, “but then again that’s part of my charm.” I hope the crew will like what I have planned for them. If not, there will be plenty of peanut butter and jelly aboard!