Christening the Oven

Today we christened the oven!  Get your mind out of the gutter because we christened it by making and eating banana bread. 

Honestly, the hardest part was getting all of the ingredients onto the boat.  So far, cooking is pretty much the same as it is on land.  True everything is a bit smaller- counter space, stovetop, sink, but remember I’m married to an architect, so he just laid out pretty much everything so that it’s twice as functional to make up for the reduced space. I’m not lying when I say that I prefer the galley over the kitchen in our apartment rental.  And I definitely prefer my pots and pans here over any I have ever owned on land. They are nesting, non-stick Magma pots and I vow to use them for the rest of my life. Why? Cause the food cooks evenly, nothing ever seems to burn and they are so easy to clean and store.

We are absolutely amazed by how many provisions we were able to store on Gerty over the last few weeks. She seems to be a reincarnation of that Little Shop of Horrors plant that is able to ingest all the actors in the show over a ninety-minute period with no intermission, with no ill effects other than letting out one large burp during the finale. Gerty just swallows up stuff. Due to the Coronavirus, buying in bulk was not an option. I was beyond embarrassed when I tried to buy ten boxes of pasta at a Stop & Shop four weeks ago and the cashier made me put back eight!  I must’ve looked like I was stockpiling fusilli.  Admittedly, I was stockpiling fusilli, but not because I was a toilet paper and pasta hoarder.  Part of me wanted to explain away my shame to the masked cashier and customers by telling them that I was provisioning a bluewater boat, but I had the sense to recognize that nobody would give a shit.  Note to self, “You are going to have to provision slowly over time and make many more trips to the grocery store.”  I did wind up ordering some bulk items from Walmart, but it was not as efficient as I was hoping.

Fast forward to about five days ago when we loaded 10 pounds of pretzels, 12 cans of black beans, 24 cans of fruit cocktail, 10 pounds of spaghetti, and so on into the dinghy and then into Gerty.  So here’s a tip.  Cans should be stowed without labels on them.  We knew this as it’s widely written that the labels get yucky over time in the humid salt air.  What we learned the hard way is that it is imperative that you label the contents of the cans with sharpie BEFORE you take the label off and not after.  Even one can’s contents cannot be remembered for a millisecond among the chaos. 

Trust me on this. The bread was shockingly delicious!