Cooking on board

We try to eat a mostly plant-based diet - meaning we eat fish or meat max. 3x a week and occasionally have dairy - because industrial animal farming is unsustainable. David Attenborough explains it well in Life on Our Planet.

Recipes

Our Galley Setup

Our kitchen (galley) is small but functional. We have a gas oven and 3 gas burners which generally speaking, work quite well. There's a sink that has two faucets, one connecting to our 400 litre freshwater tank and one that pumps seawater for prewashing the dishes.

We have one larger fridge for food and a smaller one for drinks outside. There's also a freezer but we haven't been using it much to save energy.

If there's one truly essential tool in our kitchen, it's the pressure cooker, where we regularly prepare things like stews and sauces, not to mention dried beans and brown rice. Our stove runs on precious propane, and the pressure cooker allows us to regularly plan on slow-cooked favorites without completely depleting our fuel supply.

Sha-Mayn preparing dinner

Sourcing Seafood

Finding seafood while traveling by boat is easy. Whether it's from the local fishermen or self-caught, there's always plenty of fish.

Fishermen in Italy selling their catch of the day right in front of our boat

Fresh off the boat

Sha-Mayn gutting a tuna during our passage to Ibiza.

A self-caught tuna

A meal on S/V Kaya

Pickling and Fermenting

We love to pickle and ferment vegetables to stretch out their lifespan. Pickled onions and cucumbers are staples for us because they pep up the simplest of dishes.

Kimchi is surprisingly easy to make, supports gut health, and lasts for months in the fridge. Another less well-known fermented condiment we love to have on the boat is Shoyu Koji. We make a real effort to stock koji grains (the basis for miso) and ferment them with organic soy sauce. The result is an umami-rich probiotic condiment that we use in lieu of soy sauce. It's a secret weapon that goes well with everything!

Homemade pickled cucumber, pickled onion and shoyu koji.

Homemade cabbage kimchi

Fresh greens

It's not always easy to find good produce, especially on small islands the selection can be quite limited. Farmers' markets are our favorite and we happily make a detour to buy local.

We grow our own sprouts on the boat to supplement our shopping. In particular, when we're missing vegetables that go well with Asian cooking, it's easy to grow mung bean sprouts in just 4 days.

Farmers market in Vigo, Spain

Veggie market in Sicily

Watering the sprouts in a sprouting jar

Fresh veggies at a market in Sicily

Baking

We haven't baked as much as we wanted and definitely want to up our game here. In Europe it's easy to find good bread, so there wasn't much motivation for us to get into the habit of baking but that will most likely change once we get into the Caribbean and beyond.

My brother making bread on passage from Corsica to Elba

Kaya bread