Eating on a Boat

Hope Town has many good restaurants, and we love conch fritters, grouper nantua, and other great dishes served here. 

But we also like to cook our own food in our own boat.  Here are some recipes that work well:

Grouper:  this was pan fried with spices our daughter gifted us before we left.

The spices:

We don’t fish, but the Vernon’s is sometimes supplied with fresh fish – when it’s not too rough to go out into the ocean (it’s been blowing 30+ every day for the past five days).  We eat fish with a lettuce salad and sometimes a can of three bean salad. 

We can buy frozen chicken breasts, which we bake or pan fry with Old Bay – our favorite way to flavor chicken.  We eat it with sweet potatoes or broccoli.  And sometimes plaintains.  Ground hamburger is easily available and I make meatballs:  onions, bread crumbs with milk, egg, spices, and cheese.   We especially like a dish we call “Mexican” which is a layer of chips, topped with cheese, beans, red pepper, onions and avocado.  Sometimes we can buy fresh cilantro!  We also make veggie pizza – with homemade crust and sauce that starts as tomato paste. 

Here is a bread recipe we’ve grown fond of, given to me by a friend here and originally from the King Arthur website:  http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-crusty-white-bread-recipe   Add dipping oil and you have a lovely take-along appetizer which everyone will love.  I make one-third of the recipe at a time because I don’t have enough room in my tiny fridge to keep the entire recipe.

I’ve never been a good cookie maker, but we found a Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie mix at the LVA foodstore that only requires the addition of an egg and 1/2 cup of butter.  Yum.

They’ve become favorites.

Our boat stores include dry foods like pasta, rice, nuts, flour and sugar, plus oils and vinegars.  But after having the boat here for three seasons, we are almost out of canned goods.  Even though most foods on the island sell for a premium, the local stores seem just fine for our provisioning.  The freight boat comes in late in the week, which is a good time to shop; there’s not much left by Monday afternoon.

What can’t be bought locally, we just have to work around.  Sometimes I complete an entire recipe and realize that I have substituted another ingredient or another version of the original ingredient for EVERYTHING.  What do I miss?   Interesting cheese, good olive oil, fresh fruits and veggies, and fish that is not grouper or snapper.   But here’s the thing:  shopping at home is such a chore – here it’s fun.  Easy-to-navigate small stores, no parking issues, friendly helpful store owners, and – shopping here is sort of like a treasure hunt – you never know what you’ll find.