Cookbooks

Sailfree

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At one time I was skipper of the boat and the others were there to serve me and cook.

I now find that the crew are now capable of skippering the boat and are looking to me to take my share of cooking!

Can anyone recommend a good ships cook book or some simple meals.

As always limited to 2 burners and 1 oven. Got a pressuire cooker though!

Thanks
 
The Moody Owners Cookbook is good, all recipes contributed by sailors - compiled by SWMBO and friend.

Yours for £5.00, half price!
 
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The Moody Owners Cookbook is good, all recipes contributed by sailors - compiled by SWMBO and friend.

Yours for £5.00, half price!

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Where from?
 
Proud owner of said cookbook, but a word of warning, the recipes seem perhaps a tad "solent marina" rather than Med anchorage.Just try and buy the ingredients for cod and prawn mollee (page 33) in some sleepy Greek village, keep them fresh enough until the evening's anchorage, then cook it all when the wind has expectedly turned nasty!
 
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As always limited to 2 burners and 1 oven. Got a pressuire cooker though!

Thanks

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Tin of Stewing Steak
Tin of 'new' potatoes.
Tin of peas.
Tin of carrots.

Tin of pears.
Tin or Carton of double cream

Chuck the Taters and stewing steak in one sauspan.
Chuck the carrotts in tother
Wait a bit and chuck the peas in the same pan.

Serve up Steak, tatties peas and carrots.

Chuck the double cream on the Pears and juice

YUMMY



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Chuck the pressure cooker overboard /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif


Ooh!
Then there is FB /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif
 
SWMBO puts together a Sunday Meal before we leave .. Roast veg and Potatoes and Pork or Lamb Chops .. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif .. We also get cabbage or a Cauliflower .. Spag Boul is also welcome as is the new Ships Sheps Pie .. SWMBO also serves fish when available .. Tip for breakfast if its an early start .. Cook sausages the night before .. Place in Cobs with sauce etc and wrap in kitchen foil .. Put in fridge .. Next morning as you leave the mooring put the oven on and place in the oven .. Leave for 30 mins to warm through .. Amazing .. Nothing to tidy up and a great on the move meal .. We have Fray Bentos Pies in the locker as a last resort .. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif All done in a small galley with limited preparation space .. Two rings and an oven ..
 
How about a YBW recipe forum? We have The Lounge, why not 'The Galley'? Not for "how to tart up a FB", but thinking of Lynn's seafood pasta for example.
 
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How about a YBW recipe forum? We have The Lounge, why not 'The Galley'? Not for "how to tart up a FB", but thinking of Lynn's seafood pasta for example.

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Now, funny enough.
I Really like that Idea
 
Hm, maybe a sticky, just to be really popular? /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

We could start a new thread, but it would be lost within hours, unless we put it on the Fouled Sterngear Forum
 
See what you can chuck together from:

216 cans of corned beef
114 tins of stewing steak
48 tins of pork sausages
114 tins of Heinz baked beans
48 tins of Heinz spaghetti hoops
216 tins of condensed milk
40 tins of processed cheese
250 lbs onions
350 lbs potatoes
288 greased eggs
288 Oxo cubes
14 lbs Curry powder (hot)
7lbs ground chillies
1 case Martell brandy
1 case Grants scotch
120 cans Tennants lager
1000 Benson & Hedges cigarettes
1000 State Express cigarettes
1000 Senior Service cigarettes


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Here is our tick list.....

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Not intended for sailing, but Katherine Whitehorn's "Cooking in a bedsitter" is good for people with limited resources and knowledge. "Cooking at ground level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl, which is in any case full of socks". /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 
It depends on the basic skill level I think because it is a bit late to learn how to boil, fry, steam, grill, broil or bake with a hungry crew waiting and especially if the boat has little general ingredients and all you have is what you picked up on the way to it! Then if the basic skills are there then it depends on your and your crew's tastes, know them and it will point you in the direction of suitable cook books!

IMO avoid the boaty recipes books because they are written to make money for the authors and assume since you bought one you will need easy and quick, mostly from tins or packets! And yes I still have some.... These will often not even have photographs of what the finished article is supposed to look like or at best a line drawing.

In our case we are really into fish these days so we carry fish cookery books. One by Laura Doeser called Fish & Shellfish is absolutely superb and contains hundreds of recipes from starters to special occasion stuff via the regular and easy, plus importantly shows you how to buy and prepare fish and shellfish, where it comes from, what it is called in other languages and the basic sauces that go with it. It also shows the various tools you might find useful and the basic cooking methods, like shallow frying, grilling, poaching, steaming and so on. Rick Stein's Fish cookery books are also very good but look for the one (it's on board so I forget the title) that is jammed full of instructions and recipes rather than the 'tour of UK' or French Odyssey ones. I also have several French ones I like, one has hundreds of recipes just for scallops!

Meat cookery hardly needs recipes if you know how to grill, fry or roast and usually the recipes you use at home work just as well on the boat. The same goes for pasta or rice dishes. We do have a couple of BBQ books from Oz and the USA where they are a tad more adventurous than burning bangers or cremating chicken. We can even do a roast beef dinner in our Magna BBQ including roast taters, carrots etc, not rocket science but you do need a meat thermometer because it is very fast.

You need proper pots and pans, not cheapo stuff just because it is for the boat! We use a stainless steel steamer set with a heavy base pan that can be used as a saucepan with lid on it's own or with one or two steamer pans on top. With the steamer you can cook say potatoes and carrots in the water and other stuff like beans, asparagus, pak choi, cauliflower, cabbage etc in one or more of the top units. That then leaves the other burner free for meat or fish. We have a selection of pans but the one mostly used is a high and straight sided Tefal one (Cherbourg Carrefour) with a detachable handle and a vented S/S lid. This pan wastes no space at all and just fits with the steamer set on the other burner, the lid stops any smoke from say steaks filling the cabin too.

We took our pressure cooker off the boat as it was so rarely used, the only thing I miss it for is for doing live lobster but it wasn't really big enough anyway.

Just for example, these are our main course menus for this weekend, starting tonight on our berth:-

Pan fried (butter and olive oil) wild halibut fillets, dusted very lightly with curry powder, new potatoes, steamed asparagus, new carrots and pak choi.

Seared (butter and olive oil) sea bass fillets with crispy skin (line caught in Poole Bay), with new potatoes, cauliflower and runner beans (sadly from Kenya those)

Pan (shallow in olive oil and butter) fried medallions of monkfish, dusted with smoked paprika, new potatoes, new carrots and grilled asparagus.

For a quick meal on a Friday evening we occasionally do steak baguettes using good fillet steak with sauteed button mushrooms. This takes only as long as the steak takes to make and beats a Fray Bentos pie or hamburger hands down!

Any help? /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
I can do a magic bread and butter pudding following a recipe but it took almost 1 day to buy all the ingredients, 2 days to prepare the stock!

I am just looking for simple recipes where you can buy the ingredients, put them in/on the cooker, produce the results and tell the crew that you learnt how to do that one at Gordon Ramseys!!
 
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I am just looking for simple recipes where you can buy the ingredients, put them in/on the cooker, produce the results and tell the crew that you learnt how to do that one at Gordon Ramseys!!

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With two burners and an oven you don't really need a boaty cookbook, any cookbook would do, but probably Delia's "how to cheat at cooking" sounds like the ticket.
 
Possibly the kind of recipes you need are quite individual, like your own version of Spag Bol? That's easy enough and can be personalised.

Mine is minced steak 500gms (supermarket pack), onion, mushrooms, tin of tomatoes, Oxo cube, half teaspoon curry powder, dried Oregano teaspoon or more to taste or Italian herbs, tin of sweetcorn, salt, pepper, worcester sauce, tomato puree and of course spaghetti (long if possible).

Just fry the mince and chopped onion in a little oil, add chopped fresh mushrooms (tinned will do if you must), add the rest in whilst stirring it all and keeping it simmering. Follow the instructions to cook the spaghetti but use plenty of water and add a bit of oil to the water to stop it sticking, stir a couple of times and don't overcook, taste it at the time it says. Strain the spaghetti off and put the sauce on top, a bit of Parmesan cheese grated is good not the horrible dry sprinkle stuff.

You can use the same principle and ingredients for a rice dish (not a true risotto but I prefer it) but use chicken livers or chicken pieces or prawns or whatever instead of mince and in my case petis pois (frozen best but tinned if not) instead of sweetcorn. If you use chicken livers they only take 3 minutes so cook separately and add at last minute, same with cooked prawns except don't cook them at all. Cook the rice as pack says, we use American long grain 1 cup rice to 2 cups water but you could even (ugh) use boil in the bag. Once ready combine the sauce and the rice (drain off any excess water first) together and serve. Both Spag Bol and 'risotto' improve with age and are nice next day, even cold.

Corned beef hash is even easier and if stuck you can use all tinned. Take a tin of new potatoes, dry them and slice them. Fry the potatoes in a little oil with a chopped onion, add some ketchup, Oxo cube, tin of tomatoes, salt, pepper, Worcester sauce even a tin of button mushrooms. Chop a tin of corned beef into chunks and add (it only needs to heat, it's cooked..) and when ready serve. Gourmet is to fry an egg and put on top of each serving.

All these are large portions for two, maybe stretchable to three.

Any more requires a fee left behind the bar! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
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