A competitive spirit in the galley

Neroli
Charles Tongue
Thu 3 Jun 2010 00:58

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 Barbados and a favourite of Sir Francis Chichester on his circumnavigation) but none of sufficient size have yet volunteered.