Cooking Aboard Our Boat Rising Star. Live Aboard Cruising Meals

Here are some tips on cooking aboard a sailboat. On our boat "Rising Star" we enjoy meals that rival any cooked on land even though we do not have a refrigerator and sometimes stay away from port for weeks at a time. Cruising in the Bahamas there are many nice anchorages that once you have found them, are hard to leave. We manage just find with out refrigeration by a number of strategies such as coating our eggs with Crisco to preserve them for a couple of weeks, using UHT whole milk and buying our vegables every day at the village market.

This is exactly how people used to live, buying what you need when you need it. We don't have much trouble finding fresh produce especially if you can adapt to regional varities. For example, it may be hard to find good tomatoes so we substitute mango along with hot sauce in some salsa recipes. Plantains, which resemble bananas, fry up exactly like potatoes when green.

For our meat selection we order specialty canned meat and stock up when we are back in the US. We get canned wild meats such as venison for a reasonable price. When cooking aboard a sailboat without refrigiration you can enjoy a variety of canned meats in some ports.

When cooking on a sailboat you can incorporate dried fruits into recipes. Dried fruits such as dates and raisins will last for a long while aboard a boat when sealed. We carry dried banana chips, raisins, dates, apricots, pineapple and more and use them after soaking in water too make pies and cakes.

We chose to live without a refrigerator on Rising Star because a complete, self sufficient refrigeration system would have cost us another $6000 and we chose to spend the money on a life raft and RADAR.

Even if you do have refrigeration aboard it could fail. That's why it is good to stock up for your voyage as if you did not have it, taking along foods like we mentioned in this article in case your refrigerator quits. Cooking aboard a boat is a challenge but it is one that you can overcome with creativity.