Chez Fay is what we call our onboard dining experience. To cut to the chase, Fay serves up amazing meals night after night.
Her first challenge is provisioning. She provisions both with long term planning, like bringing key items in our luggage from California, and opportunistically along the way from local fisherman, sport fisherman, good grocery stores and local farmer's markets. She's always on the lookout for what is available. Preparing for our Pacific crossing and time in French Polynesia (where availability is still an issue and prices are reported to be very high) she did weeks of planning and shopping in Panama. Two months after our Panama departure, New Morning is still fairly bursting with food. Both freezers are entirely full of fish (from a sport fishing boat) and meat, the liquor cabinet has been turned into a pantry of canned goods, the wine locker is full of beer (and some box wine), the starboard deck locker is stuffed with gin, tonic, rum and coke, and the drawers under the forward bunk are also full of gin and vodka. I'm pretty sure we do not need to do any further shopping this year!
And what becomes of all these ingredients? Well for this passage the liquor is pretty much locked away, though last night we did have a couple of beers to celebrate passing the half way mark. But what about dinners?
Our first meal out was spaghetti and meat balls. So you're thinking, "big deal, you open a jar of spaghetti sauce". Not quite. Fay spent an entire afternoon preparing her own sauce which even included herbs from her onboard herb garden. And the meatballs are not just rolled up hamburger, their crafted from an ancient German recipe. The meal was complimented with my own artisan white bread.
Then we had stir fried shrimp with rice and vegetables. How about salmon with a papaya sauce and papaya/avocado salad? Or steak fahitas (sp?) with a greek salad of tomatoes, red onions, feta, cucumber, etc. Tonight, one day in advance of Cinco de Mayo, we had chicken quesadillas with fresh guacamole and Presidente cerveza.
All of this while she's also taking half the watch time and we're bouncing along through confused seas at 8 kts churning out 200+ mile days.
The creative meals keep coming and we eat well! Chez Fay, where the discriminating sailor dines nightly.
