A competitive spirit in the galley
34:47.6N
52:04.7W 120
miles logged, with a bit of a slowdown early this morning when the 15 to 20
knots wind we’d confidently predicted would take us to the Azores changed its
mind and dropped to very little. So we coasted along rather slowly, grumbling
about the weather forecasts until about dusk when the wind began to pick up
again. Spirits
rose with the boat speed. We’re now back on track, moving along at about 5
knots, and expecting a gradual increase in wind speed tonight.
The
last few days have seen some interesting variations in our diet. While Richard
has overall direction of matters culinary (except when arbitrarily and wantonly
overruled on menu selection by the skipper) everyone takes their turn at
cooking. Often this involves simply heating up one of our pre-cooked frozen
dishes and cooking some suitable accompanying carbohydrate. Tonight, for
example, we enjoyed duck confit risotto. But
breakfasts and lunches are open season (subject to availability of ingredients)
and Charlie threw down the gauntlet with an extensive cooked breakfast a few
days ago. Allan responded with a dinner dish of Fidget Pie (slice apples,
potatoes, onions and bacon; arrange in deep dish; add stock; bake for an hour;
eat with considerable enjoyment) and Richard followed that with a lunch of
Croque Monsieur. This normally simple dish was quite a challenge: juggling the
assembly line on a significantly rolling vessel proved frustrating and – how to
put this – a good proportion of the ingredients escaped. Today Charlie and Richard collaborated on a Salade Nicoise: simle enough, but spectacular in mid-ocean. You
may wonder where Paddy has been in this competitive cook-off. His contributions
thus far have been more on the technology side, as in (for example) his
ingenious system for suspending a pan of rising bread dough from hooks in the
engine room. And he has, of course, been preoccupied with catching the tuna for
the next Nicoise. By way
of warm-up he can be seen in the accompanying photograph proudly displaying one
of his early practice catches, a flying fish that landed on deck and got trapped
in a scupper trying to make its getaway. The cook is still eager to cook flying
fish (the national dish of |