Meal Planning Update

Hello everyone.  Yes, I'm still alive.  I've actually been working on a post I thought I would have had done months ago, but am finding it a difficult one to write.  Part of the issue is how up in the air any potential plans are right now.  In the meantime, I thought I would write about some things that I used while on the boat and still use on land.

One of these that gets regular usage is meal planning.  Unfortunately the meal planning tool I had been using has decided to make the planning portion of the online tool a pay service.  While I am fine with adding recipes I've created and contribute reviews and ratings as well as endure advertisements, I (like many cruisers) just don't have the money to pay for annual subscriptions for such things.  So, I've been looking for alternatives.

A recipe I created and manually entered into Pepperplate.

Thus far, my favorite is a service called Pepperplate. The meal planning portion of the service is similar to BigOven and the grocery list generation is actually a little better about grouping similar items together so it makes the grocery store trip a bit easier. Recipe access is better as it doesn't link to other sources for the contents or instructions but imports them into the application.  By doing this, it also allows for offline access on tablets and other devices where you have downloaded their app.

The one thing Pepperplate doesn't have is an integrated database of public recipes.  Instead, it utilizes other recipe sites and can automatically import from many sites (AllRecipes, Better Homes and Gardens, Chow, Food Network, Recipes.com, and Simply Recipes just to name a few). It has a browser bookmark applet that makes recipe import simple.  On sites where it doesn't automatically import, pulling in a recipe is a simple matter of a few cut-and pastes using the same browser applet.  This is all similar to how BigOven worked and so far I've found Pepperplate a bit easier to use.

If you are looking for an option to aid in meal planning and provisioning, you might want to give Pepperplate a try.

Heading into Southport

In case you missed it, the first part of the trip can be found here.  Continuing on...

During the second full day of sailing, the winds calmed down and we once again made our way using a combination of sailing and motor sailing in order to make reasonable headway.  I guess I can't complain though, if we were in the ditch, we would likely be motoring the whole way and, in addition, we would have to stop at night and that would make the trip take a lot longer. In the afternoon the wind started clocking around to the southwest, dead at our backs.  With the light winds, I decided to put up the spinnaker for a little while.  I do like that asymmetrical spinnaker, it seems to get the boat moving at over 1/2 the wind speed in broad reaches and downwind directions.

Spinnaker on the open ocean

Thus far I've typically planned trips using a speed of about 5 knots unless the trip is forecast to be beating directly into the wind and I want to actually sail it (I haven't figured out what speed I should use then, but am guessing about 2 knots). A good portion of this trip has been in excess of 5 knots, so it looked like we would be making it to Southport around 2am.  As evening arrived, the winds started picking up from the southwest and, a bit unexpected to me, the seas started picking up from the southeast to around 3 foot on a 5 second period.

Checking the weather forecast, it was now calling for scattered thunderstorms offshore in the Cape Fear area.  As night fell, we could see the thunderstorm clouds building to our east.  The lightning would light up the clouds.  It is a nice thing to watch...from a distance. Since the winds were continuing from the southwest and the offshore breezes would also come from the west, it should keep the storms to the east of us.  But since we had time anyway, we decided to turn the boat westward and make our way closer to shore.  We pointed the boat towards Myrtle Beach and made our way from 30 NM off the coast to around 6 NM.  When we got closer to shore, we also found a little calmer seas.

After the detour near Myrtle Beach, we ended up arriving outside of the Cape Fear river inlet at Southport around 6am.  Since we would be heading pretty much into the wind coming into the inlet, We went to start the engiines.  Unfortunately, the starboard engine, which had been just fine up to this point in the trip, decided not to wake up.  The attempt made the clicking sound that is reminiscent of a dead battery.  That same battery just happens to be the one that also starts the generator and the generator started just fine (and the voltages on the batteries seem fine).  My best guess was that there was some corrosion and the starter wasn't getting enough power, so I spent the next hour, as we slowly motored in on a single engine, down in the engine room cleaning all the starter connections.  Unfortunately that didn't help.  So, here we were again, one engine down and needing to navigate to a marina slip.

Another sunrise over the Atlantic

This time, having a bit more experience with the boat, I decided to give the marina a call and see if they have a dock I can get to without a lot of tight maneuvering.  They did, so I was able to bring the boat into the dock and then, using the lines, the crew walked it around the T-head to the slip.  The Southport marina also has a maintenance yard next door and, having just completed a 3 day passage, I was too tired to look into the problem myself.  They were able to send a technician over later that day and found that excessive corrosion inside the ground cable end had caused  the issue.  They cleaned up the cable, crimped on a new end, and added heat shrink to help protect it from future corrosion (the heat shrink on the original cable had failed and that is where the corrosion started).  Since I didn't have the tools or parts, it ended up being a good call to have them come do the work.

Tucker exploring the boat near the start of the trip

I guess I haven't really mentioned our furry crewmembers much.  For the most part, they are doing fine.  They seem to be adjusting to life on a mobile floating house OK.  To them it is probably just like a big car ride where we are taking all our stuff with us.  The one exception is dealing with the "potty mat".  Even though it should have the right smell to them, neither of them are really sure of the thing.  Tucker managed to do his business there after some coaxing, but our older dog Madison could only be convinced to pee there once.  She held her other business until she was back on shore.

Madison resting in the cockpit, tethered of course.

And for Pete, who jokingly mentioned something about eating Spam on passage, here is dinner the second evening...shrimp with a creamy tomato, garlic, and basil sauce freshly prepared en route.

Shrimp and pasta for dinner.

So, now we need to figure out where we are going from here since we still don't have a final destination in mind.  Oh, and I guess we have a couple more repairs to add to the list, so we may be looking for a place to haul out again.  Such is life on a boat.

Little Oven Meet Big Oven

Even while living at the dock I've had a couple problems with provisioning.  One was figuring out what to make for dinner and the other was remembering to get everything I need when I'm at the grocery store. Knowing that both of these items will become exponentially larger problems when I'm not tied to a dock with access to a car, I've been trying to figure out how to better deal with these problems.

A number of weeks ago I stumbled upon a service that I thought might just help out with both of these issues. The service is called Big Oven and is a combination online recipe book/organizer, meal planner, and grocery list creator.  Something like this sounded like it could help, and since the basic level of membership is free, I decided to give it a try.

They have a bunch of different recipes to try.  You can search for specific recipes if you want, or you can browse by different groupings such as a seasonal collection, quick and easy suggestions, best ratings, etc. The application allows you to review and read reviews of the recipes to help you decide which ones to try. It also lets you flag recipes you want to try and this is handy when building a menu plan. If you have your own favorite recipes, you can also add them as either publicly available or private (up to 50 in the free version) and it can also import recipes found elsewhere on the web so you can include them in any meal planning efforts.

I was able to create a couple week-long menu plans and then have it generate shopping lists from the menus.  By installing their app on my phone, I was able to sync up the shopping list on my phone so I could take it to the store and make sure I bought everything I needed.  The application attempts to organize the shopping list by departments so that you aren't running back and forth across the store or constantly scrolling through the list.  As you put items in your cart, you can then check them off of the list so you can keep track of it all.

I tried several recipes from the site as well as entered a few of my own.  Overall I think the application is handy and did help me organize a weekly menu as well as keep me on track at the grocery store.  And some of the recipes on the site are fantastic, my favorite one thus far is this Chicken Tikka Masala one.

Chicken Tikka Masala, Baingan bharta, and Naan

The application does have some drawbacks though.  When generating shopping lists, it didn't seem to combine ingredients from multiple recipes into a single shopping list item...so I ended up with three listings for "1 onion" instead of a shopping list that read "3 onions"...and this can make the shopping list rather long if you have a large menu plan.  The big catch for cruisers though, is that everything is stored online.  This means that once you are done planning, you will need to make copies of your plan and all the recipes before you head out of internet range.  Not impossible to overcome, but would be nice if the application could save this stuff for you without having to resort to screen captures or cut-and-paste.

Still, it is a tool worth having in your meal planning and provisioning arsenal.  So, if you cruise, do you have any special apps or techniques you use to help with these tasks?  Leave a comment and let me know.