Seat of my pants cooking
Or, galley realities aboard Calypso
Welcome to Let’s Get Lost! I’m Rebecca, a recipe developer, food photographer, passionate people watcher, and chaser of new experiences. You might know me from my recipe websites, Of Batter and Dough and A Little and A Lot.
My husband and I are nomads without a home base but with many modes of transportation, namely an RV, a motorcycle, and a sailboat. I write recipes and stories for curious people who believe experiences are more important than things and who want more adventure.
Get every issue and recipe directly on rebeccablackwell.com.
This week’s issue was written by a guest author, one of my favorite Substack writers, Nica Waters who writes Small Sailboat Life. Nica and her husband live aboard a 28-foot sailboat named Calypso and are currently sailing around French Polynesia.
Nica is endlessly inspiring to me. Last summer, Steve and I lived on our newly purchased sailboat for 7 weeks. Our boat is 38-feet with maybe 150 square feet of cabin space and, I’ll tell you what, we could barely manage it. Meanwhile, there’s Nica and Jeremy, sailing through French Polynesia on their even smaller boat, living their lives in its tiny cabin and making it look so damn easy.
One of the things I love the most on Small Sailboat Life is Tasty Thursdays, a once a week post about what Nica is cooking. It’s incredible what she makes in her tiny galley kitchen… homemade bread, muffins, and other baked goods, drool-worthy pasta dishes, falafel with homemade yogurt, chicken marinated in fig jam, garlic, lime juice, ginger, finely chopped lemongrass, and a splash of soy sauce. YUM.
I feel like I learn something new about economy and thrift with every issue and she gives me hope that someday, Steve and I might have it in us take off and sail across the world.
I asked if Nica would be willing to contribute a guest post for this newsletter and was just pleased as punch when she said yes. Enjoy.
And, if you’re as fascinated by Nica’s life as I am, please subscribe to her newsletter. You’ll find it here:
Seat of My Pants Cooking
by Nica Waters
There are 4 cookbooks and a wooden box of recipe cards on the bookshelf on our small sailboat, and to be honest most of the time they serve only as decoration. Out here, where the nearest store of any kind is a 4 hour sail away and what’s on the shelves can depend on how recently the monthly supply ship arrived from Tahiti, reading a recipe that calls for something exotic (read: unavailable) can be more frustrating than anything else.
While I do pull out those references occasionally if my imagination needs a jog, usually my cooking is done fully by a wing and a prayer. I’d say the success rate is closing in on 99%.
The odds are improved significantly by only having things we like to eat aboard, aided by an understanding of spices (again, the ones we like) and how they might complement each other. I’ve got some favorite “kitchen sink” kinds of concoctions that are good places to use up those small amounts of whatever.
box of lardons, too many eggs, 2 tablespoons of hummus, cheese - lots of feta, brie, cheddar, chèvre, emmentaler, half a sausage stick, butter, 3 tablespoons of salsa, quarter of a purple cabbage, half of a baguette . . . it’s not supposed to rain . . . sundowners on the beach this afternoon . . . just had pizza . . . oh there are avocados to eat too, and cabbage. Carrots. A lot of lime juice. Star fruit. Yogurt
The litany of what’s in the fridge, what needs to be eaten, what the weather’s like runs through my head on a constant loop. We’ve barely finished one meal before I’m figuring out what the next one will entail.
Some of that is practical: Will something need extra lead time? There’s no point in deciding at 5 pm that you want pizza for dinner that night when the dough requires a few hours to rise. Want Indian food? Oh, crap, we finished the yogurt for breakfast, so scratch that idea. (Now go make yogurt right now, while you’re remembering. Your future self will thank you!)
Some of that is frugal. When a cabbage here costs $10 a pound, and any that comes in on the ship is snapped up as soon as the shops open at 5 am, every leaf that goes bad before it can be used is money down the drain. This might be why you notice a lot of small amounts of whatever in the list (an actual list, by the way) above.
A lot of it, though, is that eating well for us is a hallmark of successful cruising. We could, of course, eat black beans and rice for every meal (at least until the black beans run out - they’re not available here in French Polynesia but rice, white rice, is in every small store) but why settle for that when creation is begging to be employed?
I start with what’s going to go bad soon if it’s not used. We don’t have a freezer, so buying time by chucking something in there is not an option. That list above? The hummus, the lardons. Avocados. Salsa. Almost everything else will keep for a few more days.
We could do a nibble dinner. That would use the hummus (with some carrots), the avocado (turned into guacamole, maybe with crackers or I could make tortilla chips), the baguette, the salsa (a second vote for those chips). Ugh I just don’t feel like pulling out the masa harina, making the tortillas, and then making the chips. Plus we just did chicken patties for dinner last night, which involved frying.
We could do a frittata, a crustless quiche that’s a favorite when we have excess eggs. That would use the lardons, the salsa, some of the cheese. I could add in the hummus but that might be too weird a combination - or would it just make it creamy? must consider - or we could have carrot sticks and hummus for nibbles before dinner. Or take them as our sundowner snack offering! A frittata would also use the baguette up very nicely. Added benefit with this is that it can be made ahead of time, since it’s delicious hot or at room temperature; this also means the oven will have a chance to cool off before bedtime. When was the last time we had a frittata? Oh yum.
This does not take into account the avocado, but I discovered the other day that if I cut avocado into chunks and toss it with lime juice, then pack it into a mason jar, it lasts for a couple of days in the fridge no problem. (Side note: avocados freeze incredibly well, if you happen to have a freezer. Peel them, toss the pits, and either freeze as entire halves or in chunks, or you can make guacamole which also freezes amazingly.)
Frittata it is!
If you’re looking at your fridge, doing the “omg there is nothing to eat in here” thing while staring at an overstuffed cold box, a couple of suggestions might help.
Start by taking everything out. Handle everything. You might organize the counter piles by something intentional - dairy, veggies, leftovers, as an example - or you might see what comes in a natural order.
Step 2 is to then pitch anything that is too far gone, but remember that if part of a vegetable is past its prime some part of it might be salvageable. Set aside your squeamishness because those bits and pieces can create some memorable meals!
Chances are very good that you’ll be drawn to a certain ingredient. Red pepper, maybe. Oh I love stuffed peppers! What else could go in those? Leftover rice! How about the three olives left in that jar? Hey, that cilantro bunch is getting wilty. Or a condiment. Hoisin sauce! Wow, I’m in the mood for something Asian-flavor-y. Dumplings in the freezer, some of that leftover rice and the half an onion and one of the carrots. That knob of ginger I keep meaning to use that’s getting shriveled up . . . Listen to your intuition and your leanings.
It might be that it’s snowing when yesterday was 75 degrees (hello, Maryland. I see you.) so soup sounds amazing, or a casserole with warming scents wafting through the air. Or alternatively, it might be 85 and the sun is out and all you want is to be outside now that it’s light past 5 pm. Let yourself play!
Don’t be afraid to riff on ideas - a lasagne is just layers of pasta and sauce and cheese, for example, and you can do the same thing with rice and salsa and meat, or tortillas, or even handfuls of leftover cooked spaghetti as the pasta layer. (I call it a kitchen sink casserole. Lots of cheese is my secret.) A sandwich can pop unexpected flavor with the 2 spoonfuls of chili crisp or fig jam.
Trips to the grocery store are getting more and more expensive. Making the most of all you buy is a key to keeping that budget in check!
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This was fun to read. And this kind of kitchen magic is a good one for all of us to learn.
And I don't think I could live on a boat. Good for you for doing it though. And huge kudos to Nica for her adventures.
Holy wow. I NEEDED to read this right now.
I just moved into an apartment in NYC with a, for my standards, small kitchen. I am trying to attach less to the way I used to cook, which was without much concern for storage space.
I was a nomad for the last year and a half, but during that time, I was mostly staying in places with spacious kitchens or eating out for most meals. Plus, each place I was in was viscerally temporary. So, I learned to adapt and not attach.
Now that I'm in this apartment for a 16-month lease, I definitely feel more attachment to having more - more space, more supplies, more convenience and ease.
This morning, I was researching small kitchen islands and a freestanding cabinet that I could add to expand my storage space. I was getting a little stressed about the cost of the extra storage solutions, which will hold extra stuff that will also have a cost. But now, I'm reconsidering. I'm rethinking whether I really need all of this, or if I can just use this as an opportunity to be creative--with my space and my ingredients, which will both show up in my cooking.
Thank you so much Nica and Rebecca for sharing this.