Splendid Boat Recipe #3: Don’t lose your veggies!

Fresh fruit and veggies… What a luxury for sailors!  I remember when I first watched Waterworld, everybody fighting for a couple of handfuls of earth so that they could grow something… We sometimes grow sprouts from mung beans but they need so much water! We can only grow them when there’s plenty of rain. We’ll be able to fix the watermaker we have one day (a friend of Alex’s gave it to him), but they’re really expensive, most people don’t have them. Fridges are more common but ours is tiny, so we can’t count on cool storage either. Most veggies last a blink. We eat salads for five days straight and then it’s probably a month until we get to eat lettuce or avocado again, sometimes even longer if we don’t want to go to the city.

Some fruit and veggies last a lot longer (oranges, apples, pears, cabbage, onions, carrots, etc) but they also do go bad after a while. Here’s what we do: we rescue them with sugar!

All fruit that has become too ripe can obviously be used for desserts (we make fruit pancakes, jam, pies,  puddings, cakes, etc). But veggies too can be pickled and stored with or without refrigeration for quite a lot longer, and they are yummy! Here’s our favorite recipe:

Chinese sweet’n’sour appetizer

Ingredients:

Carrots – pealed and sliced
Cabbage – sliced
White vinegar
Water
Sugar

Procedure:

– Put the carrots and cabbage in a pot. (I like to slice the carrots either with a pealer to get thin strips or I cut them twice along the length and then make thin slices to get little triangles).
– Cover half of the veggies with a mix of 3 parts vinegar and 1 part of water.
– Add plenty of sugar, almost as much as the liquid.
– Bring to a boiling point. Stir once in a while so that everything gets soaked and the sugar does not burn.
– Turn off the stove, leave the pot covered for half an hour or so.
– Open it, let it cool down and they’re done!
– It’s better of course to keep them in the fridge, they’re nicer when they’re cold, but if you leave them out they will still last a lot longer than raw.
– EAT THEM WITH YOUR HANDS OR WITH CHOPSTICKS! It’s more fun and they taste better : )

Remember as well that caramelized onions are lovely (we make them with sugar or honey) and you can use them for lots of meals, they are great in salads, Thai style stir fry, served with meat or pork, etc.

Author: Alex

I'm just a sailor bum ;) View all posts by Alex