From Birth Until Age 85, You Have 750,000 Hours - How Will You Spend Them?

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Sailing Preparation - Provisioning Revisited

Provisioning (planning, purchasing, preparing the food) occupied a great deal of my time in getting ready for this trip. I'm not a franks and beans type of gal and roughing it isn't really my thing. Steve and I are foodies in the truest sense of the word and realised if we were going to do this for any period of time, the food had better be darn good!

I spent hours finding and making lists (which I won't bore you with here!), but the provisions essentially boiled down to some core categories which seem to be working out well. The main categories are:

Foundations - Pasta, rice, cornmeal, flour, etc. - the things that you build meals upon
Canned goods - This includes anything in a can - Beans, veg, soups, tinned meats / seafood, smuggled in pate from the UK, fruits, canned cream and condensed milk
Wet stores - Anything that's wet - fruit juice, sauces, condiments, liquor, olive oil, etc.
Dry stores - Anything that's dry - Mixes, crackers, more flour, seeds, nuts. This would also include non-canned fruit and veg.
Frozen - Meat and fish (that we've actually caught ourselves!)
Fridge - Veg / dairy

I work from a master list which I can sort alphabetically and by grocery store location. Way too detailed, I know, but have you ever tried purchasing $500 worth of groceries with a non-categorised list? You definitely get your exercise, jogging back and forth across the supermarket!

The 'green bags' that I spent way too much money on (I thought) have been worth every penny! Lettuce lasts 3 or more weeks. Green peppers are still crunchy fresh 3 weeks in. Tomatoes last at least two weeks.

The freezer, with its 'Stevie Special Improvement' (so great being married to an engineer!), freezes things rock hard and makes the all important ice for cocktails. The Improvement? With the warmer weather, it just wasn't freezing things that thoroughly so Steve put a folded fleece blanket over the top of the food, inside the freezer. Presto, completely frozen food!

Except for some insufficient quantities of things we quite like, the provisioning seems to be holding up and the food has been anything but beans and franks! In a week or so we 'could' use some green veg, but that's it and we're not really desperate for that.

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