It was the last glimpse of 2019´s summer when I had the honor to take part in the VIP-regatta “Rose of Charity – the Race” which in this year took place in the Greek waters of the Saronic Gulf. My boat was a Sunsail/Moorings 410 and I was happy to welcome Nicolas and Fabienne as part of my 4-person-crew. Both are lead figures within an NGO that was the beneficiary of this year´s race: Ocean Care. This organization fights for the protection of marine wildlife for over 30 years now and believe me, I had never had as enlightening and challenging conversations aboard a sailing trip before.
Well, as Rasmus, the God of the Winds, apparently had decided to drop all work during our race and the regatta turned out to be a light-breeze-thriller, there wasn´t much to do during the hour-long legs running before the “wind”. No heeling, no galley ballet and since partying hard whilst at mooring in the evening meant a late get up we were all but hungry in the hours till noon – time for a late onboard breakfast, I thought. Nicolas and Fabienne are vegetarians and so of course we adjusted – so here´s another yummie veggie recipe for your offshore cooking skills: Enjoy!
Ingredients for a yummie & satiable meal
When I went with Nicolas to the supermarket, I was astonished to learn that “we” as pointless small humans really can make a difference at first. He gave me a handful of woven poches, so-called “Veggie Bags”, and advised me to use and re-use them when shopping fruits and vegetables. Imagine how many plastic bags you won´t be using and disposing of, if you switch to veggie bags?! We shopped at least five different kinds of vegetables and five branches of fruits, that´s 10 bags per shopping event … okay, but back to our recipe: I chose unripe spelt grain, because … I could.
So, back on the boat, preparing unripe spelt grain (which is rich in fibers, have more vitamins and minerals than wheat but have much more and much more valuable protein) is a no-brainer: Just have three times the volume of the grain of boiling water, add some salt or some broth and have it cooking for some minutes, kill the gas and let it in the hot water until the grain is soft. At the same time prepare some fresh veggies as you like: I chose red pepper, spring onion and tomatoes (BEST Greek tomatoes) and chopped them nicely. Now, let´s do some patties.
Here we had a challenge aboard because we didn´t had any flour you would normally need to achieve some bonding between the ingredients. My idea was to crush salty cookies to get some improvised “flour” and try this. It worked fine: Together with some fresh eggs and my wannabe flour the patties fried just neatly in the pan. It took each patty some five minutes from either side to develop a nice crunchy crust. I added yoghurt as a sauce, some Greek cheese and garnished with slices of fresh veggie: Here we go!
A veggie sailing alternative
This breakfast caused the crew to stop talking and enjoying their patty with delight. I even prepared another second serving for the crew and their praise didn´t stop. So, apparently, unripe grain patties are a very nice alternative to fried eggs and bacon (which still is the best breakfast possible in my eyes). So we sat in the cockpit, enjoyed our meal and for twenty or so minutes forgot to rant about the unfavourable sailing conditions.
In the end, living a vegetarian life for me still is very hard since I love to eat meat and fish and all this delicious stuff. It´s kind of fascinating and exciting to discover the delights of veggie food and the good feeling – a real good feeling! – that comes with eating “green”. Maybe I try to reduce my meat consumption and restrain this to less but better, locally produced meet and focus on vegetarian food and improving my cooking skills in this matter. We´ll see. Thanks to the Ocean Care-guys to contribute to this development.
You may also find interesting to read these articles:
All sailing recipes
Offshore cooking: Galley ballet
One week veggie sailing experiment