When you would kill for something to eat other than beer snacks: Wrap lunch

Sailing will make you very thirsty, mostly because of the weather that you are enduring. Windy conditions will dry you out faster. And of course, the effect of the sun. Sitting on a boat makes it worse, as you cannot escape the elements. Not really. So you eat snacks and drink beer and water. But you stay hungry.

Combine this with the efforts and work required to keep the boat sailing and you end up being relatively tired and really hungry. Nobody really wants to cook, but everybody agrees there need to be something more than the snacks.

This is fast food, but not in a derogatory sense. A variation on the pasta lunch. No cooking or boiling of water required, which makes it a cinch. Only some rudimentary preparation required.

If you are industrious, you can make the filling at home and stash it in a seal-able plastic container. This will keep for the day and the flavours will develop.

Take some rosa-, cherry- or chopped normal tomatoes. The smaller ones I just cut in half. Squash them with your fingers if you want to. A cupful of this. Add a cupful of chopped cabbage and a small chilli, pips removed and chopped. Add half a carrot, sliced thinly, julienne'd if you will, and an onion, chopped. The filling needs something crunchy as well as something a bit piquant. Sweet bell peppers will also help. Half a cup of bean sprouts or other sprouts. Mix thoroughly and add a blob of mayonnaise.

Get some spicy sausages, three or four will do the trick. Five if you are hungry. Slice them up into thin wheels. Add to the mix.

Done with the filling before the next tack!

For the wrap I used store bought rotis, a flat bread made with yeast. My readers in parts of the world other than Cape Town may find a normal pancake size tortilla wrap more readily available. It does not really matter. For a day sail, the easiest wraps are those that you get from your nearest food shop or supermarket.

Ladle a liberal dessert spoonful of the filling into the wrap, then fold the wrap around the filling leaving one side open. Wrap this lot in a paper napkin and you have your very fast lunch.

This lot will make about five portions, so you will need at least five wraps. Scale to your heart's content. And experiment with the ingredients, the variations are endless.

Voila! Lunch! And hardly any dishwashing required.

Bon appetit.

Lunch guest

Authored by Johan Zietsman

Last updated on 2013-02-26

This blog post compiled for the GBYC newsletter.

Korma Curry, Boat Style

 

I have often thought about the difference between what I do versus your standard urban food blogger, cooking in his or her five star kitchen. Complete with all the electricity and associated equipment. I have also thought at length about what I call in Afrikaans “afskeepkos”. Food made in negligence. I have gone so far as to post (or is it “pose”?) the question on my FaceBook wall, with some reaction.

The answer is not easy to find, as the term “afskeepkos” is a neologism, even in Afrikaans.

The proper answer needs to be researched and pondered, if you will.

The gist lies in the application of the mind in preparing food. Whatever food it is. Leftovers may look and taste like, well, leftovers. Or you can apply your mind and use those same leftovers in an altogether new dish.

Or you can use some of the stuff that you munch on before dinner as part of the dinner dish ingredients.

We are not here to discuss the vagaries of language and application of the mind, we need to cook up something simple for dinner on board. Using two pots and one burner. Perhaps this one will go down in history as having applied the mind.

Chicken Korma is one of the more well-known dishes in India. It is made with onions and cashews, along with the requisite spices. And it is extremely simple to make. If this dish takes more than fifteen minutes in preparation, you are doing something wrong.

The nominal recipe is to use the ingredients in the list below. There are a myriad variations and even my own version differs between batches. But they all taste exquisite.

This one is normally made in the kitchen at home, where you have access to a stick blender or equivalent. Aboard a small yacht there is none of that, hence this adaptation.

Ingredients

For the chicken

500 g (1 lb) de-boned chicken.
3 medium sized onions. More is better for this dish.
½ cup whole cashew nuts. Or one whole cup, but then the dish becomes very rich.
1 clove fresh garlic
1 fresh hot chilli
½ teaspoon coriander seeds
½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
5 black peppercorns
1 cardamom pod, shedded
1½ teaspoon medium masala powder
½ teaspoon turmeric powder
½ teaspoon mustard seeds
Small stick cinnamon bark
1/4 teaspoon aniseed seeds.

Or combination of the above. The chillies, garlic, onions and cashews are not negotiable.

1 teaspoon green masala paste (recipe here)
1 teaspoon garum masala
bunch of fresh coriander leaves, chopped
spritz of fresh chives, chopped
some salt to taste
2 tablespoons butter

For the rotis

½ cup white or brown bread flour. I used brown bread flour
½ inch slice of a brick of butter
pinch of salt
¾ cup lukewarm water

Process

For the Chicken Korma

Fry the cashews in a dry pan until they are nice and brown. It works better if you have a cast iron saucepan or pot, because the pot heats the food from the side as well. The heat retention also helps with the rest period at the end. I used my 20cm Le Creuset saucepan for this.

Take them out and crush them as fine as you can get it. I used a coffee mug and the back ends of my kitchen knives. Keep the crushed cashews to one side. Add a dollop of butter to the pan and fry the dried whole spices until the flavour comes out. I use my mortar and pestle to grind the whole spices a little before frying them.

Add the grated onions and fry until they are nice and translucent, beginning to turn brown. This may be difficult as the onions will be very watery because you grated them. Add the chopped fresh chilli and and garlic and fry for another two minutes, then add the dry powder spices. I crushed the cashews while frying the onions to save time by multiplexing. Fry for another minute, then take it off the heat. Add the crushed cashews and a little water to make a batter-like sauce. Then put it back on the heat and bring to the boil.

In the home version you chop the onions coarsely, then fry them until they are brown. The spices are added as above. When everything is ready, the fried whole cashews are added back to the mix and blitzed with a stick blender to make the sauce, adding water as required.

The sauce can be quite thick, leading to burning if careless, so watch it. Add a little water if you get worried.

Now add the chicken. I cut the chicken into thickish slices, as opposed to cubes. They cook faster if they are thinner. Cook slowly until the chicken is tender. Add salt as required. Make sure you don't use too much water. The dish needs to be almost just runny when done. If it is too watery it becomes a mess to eat and most of the flavourful parts get left in your plate. When the dish is nicely done, add the garum masala, the chopped coriander (dhania), and the chopped chives. Put the lid on and set this lot aside to rest.

For the Rotis

This was one of my more successful experiments. The internet is a wonderful place if you understand that different folks have different names for the same stuff. Like rotis. Some call them flat breads, others call similar bread tortillas, even though they may not be made from corn flour.

Whatever the case, I used an idea from a recipe for tortillas. You rub the butter into the flour and add the salt to the warm water. Then add the water little by little to the flour making a very soft dough. This dough will be nice and elastic for only a short time, so work diligently. Knead the dough for five minutes until it becomes satiny. Then roll it into a long sausage about two inches thick (50mm). Cut this into 50mm sections to make small balls.

Roll each ball out into a small disk about 4mm thick. Bake in a dry pan on medium heat until it starts to puff, then turn over. You will know that it is done when it starts to burn in spots. You get a production line going, baking one at a time and rolling the next one while you wait. I used my 24 cm non stick frying pan from Le Creuset, it works a charm.


In the meantime, the main dish is resting and developing flavour. Don't worry. If you used a cast iron saucepan it will not even cool down to edible levels while you are making the rotis. Else heat it a little as required.

You can dish up straight from the saucepan at the table. Two rotis per person is more than enough, there will be leftovers.
And it is accepted practice to use the rotis to wipe out your plate.

Bon appetit!

Authored by Johan Zietsman
Last updated on 2013-07-06

Sourdough bread # 2: Puri And Cooking On A Small Boat

I recently had a long conversation with some of my friends in the sailing fraternity. All sea gypsies and sailors of some description. The gist of the discussion was about cooking on board small sailing vessels. Specifically making bread.
Long voyages on small vessels easily become a bit of a survival camp, especially if you don't plan sensibly. The boat does not stand still and you have very few appliances aboard to ease your work in the galley. (For those non-sailing friends out there, the kitchen on board a boat or ship is known as the galley.)
Typically you would have one 25 cm pot, one 15 cm pot, a small kettle and a wok or a frying pan. There would also be a mixing bowl and some cutlery, as well as some kitchen implements. As a result of this dearth of implements, I have gone and bought my very own spatula, kettle, chef's knife, filleting (boning) knife and paring knife. All good quality stuff that does not rust within the first week. I also take along a knife sharpener and a proper potato peeler. I use that one also to peel butternut pumpkins. A wooden spoon, wooden tongs and an Indian rolling stick completes my galley kit.
And I have my own spice box that goes along. No mixed spices in my food if I can help it. You mostly have very little idea of what a proprietary spice mix contains. My masala powders are bought from shops that mix their own spices, so there are no preservatives or other chemical additions. Well, hopefully. And I make my own green masala paste (recipe here).
You may well ask what this has to do with making bread. The answer lies therein to sketch the conditions aboard. Spare a thought for these people that would like to stay alive in some style. Most of us shore bound folk probably don't have a feel for the conditions of cooking at sea while we are standing in our well-equipped kitchens on solid Mother Earth turning out five star dishes.
My sailing friends are gearing up and preparing for the ocean race for the Governor's Cup. The race starts in Simon's Town, False Bay in South Africa and ends at the island of St Helena. All of about ten to twelve days' worth of sailing, just over 1800 nautical miles in all.
So, after our last discussions, I decided to make bread that is suited to these conditions.
Bread can be made in several ways. Firstly, one can use dough that is leavened or not. Then there is the method of cooking or baking. One can bake a bread in the oven, as what is regarded as normal in the western world. This may be in a baking tin or just on a baking sheet. Then there is a whole variety of flat breads to be made in a frying pan. One may use a dry pan, a little bit of oil or fry the bread in deep oil. And lastly, in South Africa, we sometimes make bread by simply putting the lumps of dough on the braai (barbecue or griddle for our foreign friends).
I decided on an Indian style of bread by the name of puri. This one is a leavened bread baked in a frying pan in light oil. You certainly don't want hot oil spattering around on a small boat bucking in the ocean.
I used my latest wild yeast, the story of which is related in an earlier post on this blog. Ingredients are one cup of wild yeast, two cups of white bread flour, one cup of whole wheat brown bread flour, half a cup of rye flour, a pinch of salt and about one cup of tepid water. And about half a cup of white bread flour for the kneading board.
You need a starter, so that's where I used the half cup of rye flour added to the sourdough. This is for increasing the yeast quantity. This was left for eight hours overnight to get really lively. The frothing result was boiling over by the time I got to mixing the main dough. At least something positive there. The rest of the ingredients were added and the dough kneaded until it becomes silky to the touch. I then wetted my hands with some cooking oil and patted the dough ball to cover it completely on the outside. This dough ball was then put away in the plastic mixing container with a lid on. Between the oil and the lid the dough does not dry out.
After seven hours the dough had risen to more than double the volume and I kneaded it back to the original volume. After that I left it to rest for another hour or so. Then I rolled the dough ball into a long snake about two inches or 50 mm thick. Cut it into shorter pieces if the snake gets too long. Use a sharp knife and wet the blade with water, else the dough will stick to the knife. You don't want to tear the dough, it needs to stay nicely sealed to keep the bubbles that are forming whole.
Now cut the snake into short cylinders to make balls of the same size as the snake. Wet the small balls with a little oil and roll them out to less than 6 mm or a quarter of an inch. You can do this one at a time, there's no rush. You get a one person production line going. Fry the flattened breads immediately in a dry pan. You roll out the next one a soon as the preceding one goes into the pan and so on. There is enough oil on them after the rolling out that you should not need more oil. Earlier I said the bread is to be fried in light oil. You may put a millimetre of oil in the pan if you prefer, the results are pretty much the same. Watch out that the oil does not get too hot, else the bread will burn in spots. The oil helps the flat piece of dough to make proper thermal contact with the frying pan.
You need the frying pan on the warm side. Turn the bread over after a minute or two. The fried bread should look like the outside of a normal loaf, just thin. You can fry them as dark as you like, but watch out for drying them out completely. Remove each one from the pan and set aside on a paper towel to cool and absorb any excess oil.
And wait till they have cooled down properly before digging in. A burnt tongue is not a happy experience.
This recipe is also suited to get primary school children into making bread. Holiday pastime, especially in rainy season, methinks. I would use instant yeast or dried yeast which goes faster, else they may lose interest.
These breads do not need a bread knife to cut, which is a boon at sea. As this is a salt bread, you can have it as a side to a stewed dish, much like the people in the Middle East and India do. Or you can eat them like flapjacks. These ones were made with a wild yeast and thus have a sourness which is exquisite with honey and real butter.
You make'um, you eat'um. How is nobody's business.




This post also linked to Yeastspotting!

Authored by Johan Zietsman
Last updated on 2012-12-12