Tag Archives: Cooking at sea

Eggless pikelets

May 7, 2020 The Captain & the Cook Leave a comment

What are pikelets? Pikelets are essentially mini pancakes made with flour, egg, milk and sugar. They are popular in the country I was born – New Zealand. I was recently in a position where I wanted to make pikelets but didn’t have eggs. We were sailing through Indonesia a few weeks ago, trying to get to Australia during this Coronavirus pandemic. As the fear of the virus spread through Indonesia, we found we were unable to go ashore to get groceries. In fact, in the end, we were unable to anchor anywhere, and things got a little scary. Read about our sailing nightmare here.

As our food supplies began to run low, we had to make do with what we had on board. Making pikelets as a filling treat for breakfast or lunch became a regular staple. Then came the day I had no eggs! The following recipe is what I came up with to overcome that particular obstacle. Seriously, I did not expect these pikelets to be all that nice and was pleasantly surprised. Dwayne loves them and says they are as good as the pikelets made with eggs. We definitely will continue to make these!

Ingredients

1 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon of cold-pressed coconut oil
Approximately 330ml milk

Method

Mix dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add the oil and the milk and whisk well.

Pour the pikelet mix into pouring jug for ease (or use a large spoon to pour batter into the pan).

Heat a large pan to medium-high. When the pan is hot enough, spray with cooking oil spray and slowly pour a small amount of batter on the pan to form round pikelets (about 2.5 inches across). Repeat adding pikelet batter to the pan. Don’t let the pikelets touch each other.

Cook until the little bubbles on top of the pikelets start to pop.

Carefully flip the pikelets and cook for another minute. Remove the pikelets and then repeat until you have used all the batter.

Serve with jam and cream, honey, or sugar and lemon. For a savoury treat serve the pikelets with sour cream, smoked salmon and dill.

Also, use this mix –

* to make Blini (used for appetisers) make the pikelet rounds with a 1-inch diameter and top with sour cream, smoked salmon, dill or caviar.
* to make pancakes double the recipe and cook large pancakes.

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Salad, Thailand

Thai Banana Blossom Salad

September 15, 2019 The Captain & the Cook Leave a comment

As we have spent a lot of time in Thailand over the last four years, I find myself cooking many Thai style meals. I usually shop at the local SuperCheap (a Thai supermarket) and use primarily local Asian vegetables and fruits in our meals.

For over a year now I have regularly seen banana flowers in the veggie section and finally decided to make a banana blossom salad. Using the traditional flavours of Thai cuisine this what I came up with…

Ingredients

3 Tablespoons lime juice
2 Tablespoons fish sauce
1 Tablespoon palm sugar*
1 Tablespoon chilli paste or chilli jam
3 Tablespoons coconut cream

1 banana blossom
1 large red chilli
1 large green chilli
1 small carrot (or 1/2 a large carrot)
2 spring onions
bean shoots
4 Tablespoons of Asian fried shallots
2 Tablespoons of crushed peanuts**

Method

Mix the lime sauce, fish sauce, palm sugar and chilli paste in a bowl and stir until sugar is dissolved. Add coconut cream and blend well. Check for the right balance of salty, sweet, sour and spicy. Adjust as needed (fish sauce – salty, sugar – sweet, lime juice – sour and chilli paste – spicy). Set aside.

Cut the chillies lengthwise, remove the seeds and pith. Slice the chillies thinly and add to a large mixing bowl. Grate the carrot and add to the mixing bowl. Finely slice the spring onion and, along with the bean shoots, add to the dish. Set aside.

Fill a large bowl with cold water and squeeze some lemon or lime juice into it. Remove the outer leaves of the banana blossom until all dark leaves have been removed. Keep the best two outer leaves for serving. Cut the blossom lengthwise and remove inner core. Finely slice the blossom and place each slice in the water as you do so, to stop it going black.

Strain the blossom and add to the mixing bowl, add the dressing and two tablespoons of the fried onion and mix well.

To serve

Place two clean banana blossom leaves on plates and heap with the salad. Garnish with a tablespoon each of fried onion and peanuts.

Bon appetite

Notes

*Use soft brown sugar instead of palm sugar

**I didn’t have peanuts so used a seed mix with the salad in the photos. Peanuts would definitely suit the taste better.

Chilli paste, chilli jam and Asian fried shallots found in Asian grocery stores.

This recipe will serve two as a meal or four to six as a side dish.

Add cooked prawns to make it a meal.

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From the galley, sweets

Lime Panna Cotta

November 15, 2018 The Captain & the Cook 1 Comment

OMG! I love this dessert. Zesty and fresh, creamy and delectable! AND so easy to make. It really is a decadent indulgence which has been a hit at my dinner parties. On a boat? Believe me this is so easy to make as long as you can refrigerate the panna cotta. Another tip is make one large panna cotta instead of individual ones if it is easier for you to store in your fridge.

Ingredients

600ml cream
200ml milk
3/4 cup caster sugar
4 kaffir lime leaves, torn up*
1 teaspoon finely grated lime rind
1/4 cup lime juice
3 gelatine leaves or 10g powdered gelatine
Lime zest and lime slices, to serve

Method

I use small 85ml metal moulds and the mix fills six of them.

Place cream, milk, sugar, lime leaves and lime rind in a saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring, for seven to eight minutes. Do not allow it to boil or even simmer (just bring it close to a simmer). Keep a good eye on it and stir continually. Remove from heat. Add lime juice and gelatine (if using the leaf gelatine squeeze out excess water before adding it to the cream mix). Stir to combine. Set aside for ten minutes to help flavours to develop.

After ten minutes strain mixture through a sieve into a pouring jug and discard the solids. From the jug pour the mixture into prepared moulds and refrigerate overnight.

Run a knife around the edge of each metal mould and dip base of each mould briefly in hot water. Turn each panna cotta out onto a serving plate. Top with a slice of lime and a sprinkle of lime zest and serve.

*I think of one kaffir lime leaf as the entire leaf i.e. the double. I separate the two leaves from the stem, so in the end I have eight leaves. I wash the leaves then bunch them up and twist them to tear them, leaving them mostly intact.

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Cooking with Local Ingredients, Salad, Thailand

Som Tam

September 18, 2017 The Captain & the Cook 2 Comments

Som Tam is a Thai-style Green Papaya Salad. A popular street food, Som Tam can be found in roadside stalls, markets and many restaurants in Thailand. There are many styles of Som Tam and it is believed to have originated in Laos. Isaan Som Tam is made by crushing small crabs (Som Tam Pu) and is always very very hot! My Som Tam is more like Som Tam Thai which contains peanuts.

My Papaya was green on the outside but getting quite a pinky orange on the inside. It was still firm enough to grate, however, and very yummy.

Cooking Thai food is always about taste. I don’t follow recipes I just do it to taste. What follows is what I did the last time I made Papaya salad but when making the dressing remember to mix it, then taste it and add the salt, sour and sweet flavours to taste as needed.

Ingredients

Dressing
2 Tbs fish sauce
3 Tbs lime juice
2 Tbs palm sugar (or brown sugar)
3 cloves of garlic
2 small hot chillies

Salad
1 small papaya, peeled and grated
1 small carrot, peeled and grated
1 large red chilli, deseeded and finely julienne
6 beans, very finely sliced
1 tomato, chopped
2 spring onions, finely sliced
a handful of bean sprouts
5 Tbs tiny dried shrimp (crushed a little in the mortar)
Roasted peanuts (or crushed nuts*)

Method

For the dressing
In a jar, I mixed the first three ingredients of the dressing. I gave the jar a really good shake and then tasted the dressing. You should be able to taste the salt of the fish sauce, sourness of the lime and sweetness of the sugar. Adjust your dressing until you are happy with it by adding more of what is needed i.e. sour, sweet or salty.

With a mortar and pestle, I crushed the garlic and red chillies and added them to the jar with the dressing. I gave it a really good shake and set it aside in the refrigerator until needed.

For the salad
In a bowl, I mixed the papaya, carrot, chilli, beans, tomato, spring onion and shrimp. Then I added a couple of tablespoons of crushed nuts because I didn’t have any roasted peanuts. The peanuts in this salad are usually chunky.

I added the dressing and mixed the salad well before serving with a sprinkling of crushed nuts.

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Duck, From the galley, Salad

Crispy Duck Breast Salad

February 29, 2016 The Captain & the Cook 2 Comments

I cooked this crispy duck breast salad for our 12th anniversary dinner. Our anniversary dinner was a day late because we both forgot our anniversary, until the end of the day when I remembered. I, of course, played the “I was just waiting to see if you’d remember” card… but Dwayne saw through it!

Crispy Skin Duck Salad - this one I made for Hellen and Phil for their anniversary. — Crispy Skin Duck Salad – this one I made for Hellen and Phil for their anniversary.

What I had aboard… duck breast, cabbage, carrot, chilli, star anise, cinnamon sticks, chicken stock, ginger, garlic, peppercorns and soy.

What I did…

I made a master stock of :

1 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup dark soy
1 star anise
1 cinnamon stick
2 cm ginger, sliced
2 garlic, crushed
6 peppercorns

I mixed all the stock ingredients together and marinated the two duck breasts for 12 hours. Then I removed the duck and put the marinade into a pot and brought it to the boil. I simmered this stock for 10 minutes before adding the duck breast. I then added the duck and simmered for a further 5 minutes. I removed the duck breasts (reserve the stock) and dried them on a paper towel and sat them before a fan to dry.

In the mean time I made a salad of shredded cabbage, carrots and julienne chillies.

To serve I placed the salad on plates and set them aside. I heated oil in a fry pan and fried the duck for a few minutes on the underside before turning it over and frying the duck breast, skin side down, until crispy. Once crispy, I sat the duck aside for a few minutes while I heated the reserved stock, reducing it. I sliced the duck and placed it on the salad and ladled some of the reduced master stock over the salad.

The salad to go with this duck was made with apple and carrot.

Bon appetite!

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Cephalopod, Cooking with Local Ingredients, Pork

Pork Stuff Squid Tubes

December 19, 2015 The Captain & the Cook 2 Comments

This is easily one of our favourite squid dishes. I have cooked them a couple of times during our sailing through SE Asia. The first time was in Indonesia when we bought some fresh squid from a local fisherman. The second time was recently in Thailand at a BBQ we put on at PSS Shipyard in Satun.

Pork stuffed squid served with rice cakes and a simple salad.

Ingredients

25g Rice vermicelli noodles
3 spring onions
3 tablespoon of peanut oil
2 garlic, finely chopped
3cm ginger, peeled and grated
½ cup cabbage, finely shredded
325g pork mince
¼ teaspoon ground star anise
1 Tablespoon fish sauce
Several medium squid or 16 baby squid, cleaned and tentacles reserved

Dipping sauce

1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 small chilli, finely chopped
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons fish sauce
Freshly squeezed juice from ½ a lime

Method

To make dipping sauce, mix all ingredients well until sugar has dissolved. Taste and add more lime if needed. Transfer to a dipping bowl.

For the stuffing, pour boiling water over the noodles and allow to stand for 5 minutes until soft. Drain well, chop them into smaller pieces and place in a large bowl.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a fry pan and gently cook the garlic, ginger and spring onion until soft. Remove from heat and add to the bowl. Chop the squid tentacles and add to the bowl along with the pork, cabbage, star anise and fish sauce. Mix well.

Cooking Spicy Stuffed Squid — Cooking the stuffed squid

Stuff the squid tubes with the stuffing. Make sure to leave a little room at the top and close the top of the tube with a toothpick.

Heat the remaining oil in a fry pan and cook the tube for 10-12 minutes until lightly browned and cooked through.

Pork Stuffed Squid — Slice the squid into rings with a sharp knife.

Slice the squid and serve with the dipping sauce.

At the PSS Shipyard, while painting and varnishing our boat for six weeks, we cooked a goat BBQ. For entree I served my stuffed squid. Dwayne built a four layer BBQ to cook all the food for the 23 people that were to join in on the feast. I used two different types of squid, which I bought from the local fish market down the road. In my opinion the squid are not as yummy when grilled on the BBQ, but everyone still enjoyed them. If you were to cook them on a BBQ use a hot plate instead of a grill.

Dwayne’s four layer cooking contraption – squid cooked over the coals and there are potatoes cooking under the coals.

From the pantry

Pantry Pancakes

July 6, 2015 The Captain & the Cook 1 Comment

While cruising though Asia, there have been mornings when Dwayne has asked “what’s for breakfast?” and, like the Mother Hubbard rhyme, ‘the cupboards were bare’. Well… not quite bare. I almost always have flour, powdered egg and powdered milk in the pantry. So I get to work preparing an easy, filling breakfast that Dwayne enjoys with maple syrup. I whip up some pancakes.

Pantry Pancakes — Pancakes and maple syrup… cooked on the BBQ

Simple really, this is what I do …

Gather my ingredients…
1 cup of plain flour
1 tablespoon powdered egg
2 tablespoon powdered milk
and water to add as needed.

Then I…
…sift the first three ingredient into a bowl and gradually add water, stirring continuously until I get my desired thickness. If I’m lucky I then get Dwayne to cook them on the BBQ.

Note: The powdered eggs I bought in Coles in Australia. ‘Farm Pride’ Powdered whole eggs.

Cephalopod, Cooking with Local Ingredients

Stuffed Squid in a Rich Tomato Sauce

May 28, 2015 The Captain & the Cook 2 Comments

As we sailed amongst the islands off the west coast of Borneo, we were able to purchase fish and squid from the fisherman that visit us, when we drop anchor for the night. The squid, used for this recipe, we bought off a fisherman at Pulau Bawal and the fish I use to stuff the squid was a mackerel we traded a mobile phone and a pair of sunnies for, when anchored off Pulau Genting.

Stuffed Squid in a Rich Tomato Sauce — Stuffed Squid in Rich Tomato Sauce

It had been two weeks since we had been able to get fresh fruit and veg and I used my last fresh tomato for this recipe. At the time we had been eating rice with almost every meal. Every time I cook rice I will cook a cup of rice and I then use the left over to make rice cakes or I heat it up with curry sauce etc. This time I used it to stuff my squid.

OK so this is what I did…

I made a stuffing for the squid with:

about 1/2 cup of left over cooked rice
a small fillet of mackerel (finely chopped) about 100g
1 large red chilli, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tomato, chopped,
5 small asian shallots, finely chopped
about 1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Mix it altogether and stuff it into the squid tubes. Close each tube with a toothpick. Cook the squid tubes for 5 mins to brown them slightly and then removed them from the pan

For the sauce…

I heated oil in the fry pan and fried:

1/2 head of garlic (about 6 cloves), chopped
3 small hot chillies, finely chopped
1 large red chilli, chopped
8 small asian shallots, chopped
about 80g anchovy fillets
2 Tablespoons capers, chopped

Shallots, garlic, chilli and lots of anchovy!

I fried this until it was cooked and the garlic and shallots had softened. I then added:

1 can of tomatoes, diced
3 Tbs tomato paste
dried italian herbs and black pepper to taste.

I brought it to the boil and then simmered the sauce for about 15 minutes, after which I added the stuffed squid tubes. I then simmered it until the flavours had developed into a rich, spicy, flavoursome sauce and the squid were cooked through (adding water as necessary). I served the squid with rice.

The left overs

I used the left over sauce the next day with some mackerel fillets. I cooked the mackerel then added the sauce to the pan with the fish and simmered until heated through. I served it with pasta. Yum!

Cephalopod, Cooking with Local Ingredients, Indonesia

Nasi Campur

May 16, 2015 The Captain & the Cook Leave a comment

Nasi Campur refers to a dish with a scoop of nasi putih (white rice) accompanied by small portions of a number of other dishes, which includes meats, vegetables, peanuts, eggs etc. Nasi campur is a ubiquitous dish around Indonesia and as diverse as the archipelago itself. There is no exact rule, recipe or definition of what makes a nasi campur, since Indonesians and Southeast Asians commonly consume steamed rice surrounded with side dishes consisting of vegetables and meat. [Wikipedia]

Nasi Campur - rice, tempe, octopus skewer, tomato, cucumber and sambal — Nasi Campur – rice, tempe, octopus skewer, tomato, cucumber and sambal

Nasi Campur - rice, crispy pork, tempe, kangkung (water spinach) and chilli sambal — Nasi Campur – rice, crispy pork, tempe, kangkung (water spinach) and chilli sambal

When in Indonesia we eat like Indonesians! This has as much to do with the food/ingredients that are available, as with our love of Indonesian food. We eat rice most days, and I usually make sambal to go with it. Chilli, garlic, shallots keep well on the boat, so they feature in most of our meals during our cruising.

Our Nasi Campur consisted of octopus skewer, tempe, kangkung and sambal…..

Skewered Octopus with Lime and Basil

Marinate octopus in olive oil, lime juice, garlic and chopped basil leaves. Refrigerated for about an hour then skewered the octopus on small skewers. Dwayne grilled them on the BBQ, and I served them with Nasi Campur.

Octopus Skewers — Octopus Skewer with Lime and Basil

Tempe Goreng

Tempe is fermented soybeans. I sliced some prepared tempe into bite-size pieces and fried them in hot oil until brown and crispy. I removed them from the oil and mixed in a little kecap manis.

Kangkung

I probably do the kangkung differently every time I cook it. Still, generally speaking, I fry up quite a bit of garlic (usually garlic slices ), shallot and a bit of chilli in a little oil. I then add the washed, roughly chopped kangkung, season with salt and pepper and sauté for a minute.

Sambal

I usually make raw sambal by smashing up chillies with garlic and a small shallot, in my mortar with pestle. However, my favourite is sambal matah, and if I have lemongrass on board, I’ll make it. Sambal matah is lemongrass and shallot sambal. It will often have shrimp paste in it, but I usually make mine without the paste… I just love the taste of fresh lemongrass.

In the mortar, I smash up lemongrass, shallot, a little chilli, some thin slices of kaffir lime leaves, salt and oil. It is delicious.

Sambal Indonesia, chilli, shallot, lemongrass — Sambal Matah

Bon appétit

Cocktails, Cooking with Local Ingredients

Caipiroska

April 15, 2015 The Captain & the Cook Leave a comment

I have been searching everywhere in Batam for limes. I finally found some today. I can’t wait to have a nice fresh caipiroska! In Bali and on other islands while cruising Indonesia I have, usually, had no trouble finding fresh limes and our favourite lime flavoured treat is undoubtedly the CAIPIROSKA!

All I do is…

Wash and quarter two limes, place them in a cocktail glass with two teaspoons of brown sugar and, using a muddler, I squash the bejesus out of them. I add two shots of vodka (naughty) and some ice. Voila! Ready to drink.

Refreshing, full of Vitamin C and a good use of local ingredients!

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Our Nasi Campur consisted of octopus skewer, tempe, kangkung and sambal…..

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