I love pretty much everything to do with food – shopping for it, cooking and baking, reading about it and of course eating – so part of our bluewater prep is about getting ready to cook on the boat. I have had both shelves of cookbooks and also separate binders with recipes culled from the pages of magazines, written by friends and family, and picked up from web pages and restaurants. If you have a lot of cookbooks like I do, you might notice that you don’t necessarily use most of them; or only a few favorite recipes. At this point in my life, I rarely follow a recipe exactly, but reading recipes is important inspiration. Often on the boat I don’t have all the ingredients to make a recipe exactly as written, even if I do try to keep my cupboards well stocked.
Therefore, part of my preparation for sailing has been to consolidate my recipe collection into something manageable. One key aspect has been to laminate the recipes – so that they will last in the small little galley kitchen without getting soggy and ruined. For the cookbooks where I only use a scant few recipes, I am cutting them out of the cookbooks. That might seem like heresy, but we have very limited space onboard; and I can only take a couple of cookbooks. After going through the painful process of downsizing from my 12 full height Billy bookshelves to only two and a half; I have accepted that not all books can remain in my life. That process included a number of cookbooks, so the ones here have already survived one bout of pruning.
Some may wonder why I don’t just download everything onto an ipad; but our ipads are important back-up for navigation; and I find it easier to page through a physical recipe collection. The idea is also to have something that doesn’t require either electricity or cellular service / satellite.