packing the lunchbox

I packed most of my food for the weekend walkabout trip the other day. With just me on board and four days it was much simpler than usual. I had most of the food on hand already, borrowed from the supplies I've been buying for the June trip with Bruce (dont' worry Bruce, I'll replace it.) Below is a day's worth of food, you can see I won't be going hungry. Breakfast will be two granola bars and a cup of fruit. Lunch is the tuna salad with crackers and a cup of fruit. Dinner will be boiling bag rice or asian noodles, fresh fish (maybe) and a cup of fruit. If the fish aren't biting I'll have foil packs of fish or chicken for dinner. You also see a little GU Energy Gel there on the right. If it is a long, hot day those can help pick up the energy level a little bit.

What you don't see here are some individual bags of trail mix. I'll buy a premade bag of mix next week and add some of my favorite stuff - rainins, dried cranberries, dried strawberries and wasabi peas - to round it out.

I packed the food a little differently than usual. For a longer trip with two of us on board I'll put the food in six one-gallon jars that I got at the Dollar Store. Each jar will have basically one type of food in it. One jar will have the breakfast bars, one will have the rice and potatoes, one will have the fruit cups and so on. For this trip, just one person for four days, I put a day's worth of food in each jar (below).

(I'll also have two heater meals tucked away, so there is extra food should I get caught out there by the weather.)

The meals I'll be fixing will be a return to the menu from a few years ago, before Bruce joined the crew. My cooking level is pretty basic, I think I'll do fine with rice or noodles and some fish (fresh or otherwise) on the griddle. On our first cruise together in '07 Bruce said he enjoyed the sailing but needed to upgrade our food. And so he has. Read through the logs of our last couple of trips (off to the right on this page) and you'll find some very nice meals that he has made. When I think of Bruce cooking on our trips I get this recurring image of him using a razor blade to cuts paper thin slices from a clove of garlic. No, he hasn't done that (but I wouldn't put it past him). The meals on my solo trip will be much more basic.

The other dinner items that I'll pick up the night before the trip will be onions and peppers. They'll be stored in the little mesh hammock on the starboard side under the foredeck. No, I won't get wine or potatoes as shown in the photo below, just onions and peppers. Even I know how to cook with those.

steve