“Daddy, I really want to go back to New Zealand”, says Lukie, sidling up to David in the cockpit.
In the kitchen, my heart lurch. Is he secretly hating the boat life, and hasn’t summoned up the courage to tell us until now? Is he missing his old buddies from kindergarten, or mourning the fact that he would know several Maori proverbs by now had he been at home? Is he aching to play soccer or do karate, and resentful that all the sports we offer have water as a main ingredient? Come to think of it, what are we doing to the poor kid, keeping him on a small boat, crossing vast oceans, exploring deserted islands – it’s what I would have wanted to do when I was a child, but do kids even want those kind of adventures nowadays?
“Well, that’s where we’re headed to, eventually”, David offers levelly, putting Lukie on his lap. “Why do you want to go back to New Zealand?”
“Because there’s pizza there. And lasagne”, Lukie beams. “I really want pizza. And meat lasagne”.
Phew. Not old friends, team sports or proper schooling then. Just Lukie’s singlemindedly overwhelming focus on food. We can fix this, or ignore it, offer him a boat substitute like, ahem, tinned corned beef or maybe even baked beans if he is lucky and we have any left.
I turn back to preparing dinner –mahi mahi caught yesterday, served with rice and a salad, if a mixture of cucumber and cabbage can qualify as a salad. Considering my options for making the salad even vaguely edible, I decide to put an Asian twist on it with a few chopped peanuts and a sweet and sour white vinegar dressing. One thing you learn on a boat is to love cabbage, it being the only vegetable that remains edible after about a week of doubtful refrigeration. I should email my mum for some recipes I think idly – the Danes love cabbage and I have yet to have a meal there in recent years without some sort of brassica thrown in.
Lukie comes inside. “Mummy, what are we having for dinner?” he asks, leaning heavily over the seat that abuts the kitchen, sticking his hands over the dishes drying in the rack to try to steal a peanut out of the packet in my hand. On the boat he has taken to supervising the cooking when he is hungry, eagerly eyeing up all ingredients, listing all the things he’d like us to put into today’s dish.
“We’re having fish. The mahi mahi that we caught yesterday”, I say. “With rice, and a salad”.
His face crumples. “Oh, mummy, it’s not fair!” he whines. “Why do we have to have mahi all the time? And rice, you know I don’t really like mahi anymore, I prefer tuna. And I don’t really like rice”. He glares at me, and when I shrug stomps out to the cockpit where I hear him complaining loudly to David.
Poor Lukie. My children seem to be starting puberty at around the age of five. For Matias the main frustration used to be school; for Lukie it is obviously food. It’s not fair. Imagine having to dine on fresh gamefish every day.
Just as well that he is fed up with rice, though, because we are running out – we have been trying to empty the larder for a good clean-up, and the rice stores from Panama are getting lower. Soon we’ll only have brown rice left, and then he’ll really have something to complain about – rice that actually tastes of something, eughh! Imagine the horror.
I absentmindedly swat a cockroach that gamely creeps over the fridge top as I resume my dinner planning. It’s unusual to see them during the daytime: are we getting more? Resolutely pushing aside the thought of the Cockroach Problem, I check the clock. It’s 5 o’clock, I should get on with it. Cooking takes a long, long time on a boat, and even if you only have to make rice and a salad it pays to start early. Just turning on the gas is infuriatingly difficult. The stove has three burners, one big and two small, placed just close enough together to ensure that you can’t really use more than two at a time. For some reason the big burner won’t light easily, requiring you to hold down the gas button for anything up to ten minutes before it will keep going on its own. I’ve resorted to using the smaller burner, which means that it now takes about 40 minutes to boil the kettle. But that won’t do for rice, and so I turn to the big burner with a determined glare, shake my shoulders loose and relax my jaw, ready to think nice thoughts for the next ten minutes while trying to light it. The annoying thing is that it changes randomly – sometimes you have to hold down the gas button for only two seconds, sometimes for much longer, leaving you wondering whether you are wasting your time with extra button-pushing whenever you spend more than 2 seconds. Would it stay on if I release the button now? Should I let go? Part of the crazy unpredictability of boat life, not ever knowing what kind of switch-on-the-stove experience it is going to be. Don’t say we don’t have any fun here in the galley.
Experimentally, I let go of the button, and immediately the burner switches off. Seems we are in for a long one, this time. Swearing under my breath I close the window in case that has any bearing on my success and light it again.
At least the oven is easy to light. Other than that, it is a pretty useless appliance, though, sporting a top temperature of about 120 to 150 degrees C, with the added interesting physics-defying characteristic of having more heat on the bottom than on the top. Normally, hot air rises, but I suspect that the break in the seal on the oven door causes high heat losses, with whatever managing to brown on the bottom doing so simply because they are physically licked by the gas flames. There is one spot, in the front left corner of the baking tray, where everything burns on the bottom in about 10 minutes. Experience has taught me to leave that spot free, a blackened corner of the otherwise metallic baking tray.
Regardless of the cause, both pizza and lasagne came out disastrously bad, to Lukie’s great discontent. We can just about make scones and bread, that is if you don’t mind your rolls burnt on the bottom and squidgy raw on top. Not that I have any ingredients left for that either – they don’t seem to be selling baking powder in French supermarkets and as we’ve spent the last three months in French Polynesia and have none left from Panama, I have had to resort to using baking soda and vinegar for scones instead. Which resulted in completely yellow scones with a strong aftertaste of rotten egg, the terrible byproducts of incomplete acidification of the baking soda. They were so bad that both kids refused to eat them (“Mummy, I don’t really like scones anymore”), and Ed, David and I only just managed to swallow a few bites before we had to throw them overboard. Where fish flocked eagerly only to turn away in disgust once they’d had a bite, letting the remainder sink slowly to the bottom. Obviously fish aren’t great fans of baking soda either.
After that I spent my night watch making a yeast dough in the dark, peering out over the dark wavy seas through the galley windows to keep up my watch whilst congratulating myself on my multi-tasking talents. Just after sunrise, as I was shaping out the rolls to bake in the tender yellow light, I discovered that bugs were dotting the dough like poppy seeds – black little beetles looking disconcertingly like baby cockroaches interspersed with pale yellow elongate maggots writhing busily around. Great. After hurling the dough overboard, I emptied one flour packet after another into a baking dish, and discovered them all to be alive with creepy crawlies. So I threw our 15 kg of flour ecosystem and associated lifeforms into the ocean and wiped the larder clean of any contaminated flour dust. The bugs get in on the packaging, and when we can, we buy flower in paper bags lined with plastic, as they seem on the whole to be bug free. But the Carrefour in Tahiti only carried the standard paper bags, so we loaded up on that.
5:15 pm. “Is it going to work?” I mumble, hesitatingly letting go of the gas knob, and am rewarded by a smooth ring of flames, boldly holding their own. Result! I can proceed to chopping the salad. I open the fridge, fastening the heavy fridge lid on the hook suspended above the window to hold it upright whilst I rummage in the depths for the cucumber and cabbage, shutting the top again quickly to minimise cold loss once I’m done. I place the cutting board, cucumber and cabbage on the closed fridge top, ready to chop. The cucumber is suspiciously slimy, and I wonder if I can save it – given how hard they are to get, it is heart-breaking to have to throw vegetables away.
“Mummy, can I please have some cold water?” It’s Matias, standing at the kitchen counter, holding out his empty cup.
“Not now, please”, I sighed. “Let me just chop up these veggies first”.
To avoid heat loss, boat fridges open up vertically, the theory being that this keeps the cold air gathering in the bottom of the fridge, far from the escape opportunity reserved for warmer air up top. In our galley, the fridge top doubles as the bench top. Which makes perfect sense until you actually try to cook in a kitchen where you can’t access the fridge whilst doing any prepping, or having anything on the bench top.
The fridge top is too heavy for the kids to be able to open themselves, and as the tap water could be anything from lukewarm to bath temperature, the only really potable water is kept in a jug in the fridge.
“But mummy, I’m thirsty, I’m dying of thirst”, he cries, looking parched.
“OK, OK”, I snap, grabbing the cutting board and the sharp knife and placing them carefully on the narrow divider backing the sink between the kitchen and the saloon. The knife balances precariously close to Matias’s face and I hesitate, think better of it, and grab them back only to place them at an incline on top of the dirty coffee cups in the sink. As if aware that there is an opportunity to create some mess in the kitchen, the boat immediately lurches, causing the cucumber to roll off the board into the coffee pot, scattering coffee grinds everywhere.
“It’s OK, I can wash it off”, I mumble through gritted teeth, before opening the fridge, balancing the heavy lid on my shoulders whilst I grab the water jug. As usual, the jug is overfilled, making it impossible to lift without spilling water all over the bottom of the fridge.
“David”, I cry shrilly. “Stop overfilling the jug, it ends up all over the fridge”.
David comes in to stand in the door of the cockpit, lifts one eyebrow and shrugs, watching me edging my shoulder out from under the fridge top which falls heavily down, slamming loudly.
“It’s because of the filter”, he says, “it just takes too long, and I always forget it”. He’s installed a new water filter which makes the cold water tap excruciatingly slow, which means that we often leave the jug or the kettle under the open tap for the half hour it takes for it to fill. Only by the time it is half full we’ve often forgotten that the tap is on, leaving it until someone notices that it is running over.
“I know”, I mumble apologetically as I start to fill Matias’s cup.
“Here you go”, I said, handing him the cup. “Hold on with two hands, it’s bouncy”.
Washing the coffee grind off the slimy cucumber I decide to defer the cleaning of spilled water to some point in the future when I have more time. It takes a while to clean it up properly, anyway. You see, boat fridges, or at least the unsophisticated boat fridge that we have, have the cooling system on the inside of the fridge, a unit that drips unrelentingly as water condenses. Which means that the fridge is constantly full of water. There is a drain, but it is conveniently situated at the higher end of the sloping bottom, as if to ensure that there is always a slimy one centimetre layer of bacteria-ridden liquid slushing around the undrainable parts of the cool box. All items in the fridge thus have to be kept off the bottom in tubberware lest they get into contact with this water which acts to turn any firm, fresh vegetable into a dark mouldy mush within hours.
I finish chopping the cucumber and take the cabbage out of the bag. 5:30, time to check the rice. At least we’re not having pasta – bringing the vast quantities of water to boil that a dinner portion of pasta requires takes a good 40 to 50 minutes, more when the gas is running low. The rice is still hard to the bite, so I leave it on for a bit longer whilst I go on chopping the cabbage.
Lukie comes in again from the cockpit, bearing his mug. “Mummy, can I please have some cold water from the jug?” he asks, just as I finish chopping up the cabbage.
I triumphantly shove the chopped cabbage into the salad bowl. “Of course you can”, I smile, placing the salad bowl on top of the rice pot and open the fridge again. Hearing the fridge open again, Matias comes back in.
“Can I please have some more”, he asks. “What are we having for dinner, Mummy?”
With a sigh I open the fridge again. “Fish and rice. With a peanut sauce for the fish”. I turn to look at him, holding out my hand for his cup.
“But Mummy, you know, I don’t really like peanuts anymore”, he wails.
I turn my back, count to ten and resolve to make spaghetti with sausages tomorrow.
SV Bob The Cat 