September is already almost upon us. I can practically smell the end of October and the beginning of our next trip south. The oppressive heat seems to have broken and there’s finally some breeze although accompanied by a bit of rain at times.
I’m still working a lot and now that the weather is lightening up we’ll start to take care of our own list of boat chores. First up for Saturday will be the ceremonial “flipping of the anchor chain”.
Our anchor chain is 240 feet of 3/8th’s inch galvanized chain. I don’t remember ever having deployed more than 120 feet or so of chain at any one time. So that means that the first 60 feet of chain has spent in excess of 1000 nights on the bottom. So what we have is the first 60 of feet of chain that’s been heavily used followed by a section of 30 feet or so of more lightly used chain with the rest of the chain being pretty much unused. So we’re gonna pull all the chain out onto the dock, flip it end for end, remark it every 30 feet and pull it all back into the chain locker. I know it sounds easy but I’m confident that it’s going to be a huge, dirty pain in the ass. The chain is sure to be full of twists and walking the twists out of the chain is never fun.
While the anchor locker is empty we’ll give it a good cleaning and maybe even a nice new coat of battle ship grey paint. It’ll also be a good time to take apart the windlass wiring and give all the connections a good cleaning. It all starts with something as simple as flipping the chain and before you know it, the projects all start to snowball on you.
Christy has been busy on her new favorite website, Allrecipes.com. I’m not a big believer in the whole “following a recipe” thing but I have to admit she’s added quite a few meals to our regular rotation that are simply out of this world. So, she was due to stumble and stumble she did.
I think it was called Asian Fiasco Wraps. While she was cooking, the smells from the galley had me salivating. I had seen a large portion of ground turkey going into the pan so I assumed we were “doing Mexican”.
I set up the table in the cockpit and Christy started handing up plates of food. The first plate was covered in cut vegetables and I quickly realized we weren’t anywhere near Mexico. I recognized a few of my old friends but there were some things on the plate that I wasn’t even sure they were food.
Next up from the galley was a large bowl of warm water. WTF? After that, a large bowl of cooked ground turkey, and then a bowl of rice. Okay, I thought, it’s starting to look like a meal. Next came a package marked “Rice Paper”. They looked like corn tortillas but were so thin that you could read through them. What? Are we making an art project, collages for two?
It turned out that we had to dip these “Rice Paper’s” in the warm water and then flop them on the plate. From there on it was a lot like building tortillas. The texture of the dipped rice paper was extremely sticky and these Asian tortillas looked a lot like food stuffed in a condom. Most importantly, they tasted good and Christy seemed to really enjoy the look on my face as I surveyed the pre-meal table. It’s good to see her laugh.
She seems determined to have an arsenal of 800 recipes aboard when we leave this fall, I asked her to make this one number 801.
4 comments:
Christy, how do you store yur recipes, use a pc program? Ever use cooks.com Just more choices for Bill.
Randy
Hi Randy, Thanks for the recommendation, I had not been to that site and it looks really interesting, and Bill is psyched! Before we left to go cruising I bought a blank recipe book that I could record "old favorite" recipes in. After a while I had some written in the favorite book, some saved in WORD, some written on the backs of receipts etc. I found that I like the old fashioned way best, recorded on paper. The only recipes that go into the favorite book are recipes that I have made and that we liked a lot. I love the allrecipes feature where you can set up your own saved recipes into organized folders. The only problem with that method is that I can't access the internet when we are in areas that we don't have wifi. I usually print out recipes that I would like to make for the coming week, shop for any items I will need and then if the recipe passes the test, it goes into the favorite book. Christy
The rice "condoms" are quite good with the right dipping sauces. Try fresh veggies sliced into thin matchsticks, some avocado, lettuce, and a good spicy sauce. Then add beer.
Christy did make a couple of dipping sauces and she had all the finely sliced veggies. I didn't think to add beer, damn it, I tried to go with Rum & Coke. Thanks for the heads up.
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