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I had always wanted to cook my way somewhere on a boat. So I lit up like a slot machine when one of the six men we had met in an airport in Honduras casually asked me whether I could cook. "Can I cook?"
I pulled out my credentials.
San Pedro Sula is a scrappy city in Honduras, a connection point to that country's Bay Islands: Roatan, Utila and Guanaja. Roatan, with one of the most beautiful barrier reefs in the world, is a scuba diver's paradise. I was there with my friend Barbara, intending to snorkel and swim, but we'd been waylaid by a hurricane in San Pedro Sula.
The six men we had just encountered were going to the Bay Islands to sail along Roatan's south shore for a week on a 40-foot ketch they had booked with Caribbean Sea Yachts, a sailboat charter outfit. But for the moment we were all stranded in the airport, waiting out the weather. Which is why we got to bantering over a bottle of duty-free scotch. By the time the skies cleared, Barbara and I had agreed to come on board and cook for three days for them; if it worked out (it did), we would be engaged for the week. It was a fair trade -- we got to go sailing in the Bay Islands in exchange for three meals a day.
I was thrilled, but Barbara, a lawyer who was to be my sous-chef and reluctant dishwasher, was worried. Not about the men, who we could tell were harmless enough. She had been sailing with Caribbean Sea Yachts before and knew how they stocked their galleys. "You won't be able to pull it off," she whispered to me anxiously. "You won't have any spices, or garlic, or whisks or anything. The only thing that won't be canned will be the meat!" (I was a vegetarian at the time). I assured her that I would enjoy the challenge, and I did.
We got on the boat on a Sunday afternoon and I checked my supplies. The galley was indeed stocked primarily with canned goods: vegetables like green beans and peas, beets and potatoes, creamed corn, baked beans and tomatoes; fruit cocktail and peaches; Minute Rice and instant mashed potatoes. There were indispensable lunch supplies like peanut butter and jelly, sandwich bread and canned tuna; and cocktail snacks -- saltines, olives, peanuts, smoked oysters. On the other hand, we had fresh onions, bell peppers and tomatoes, celery, potatoes, lots of cheddar cheese, eggs and milk, vinegar, mustard and salad oil. There was plenty of meat and a hibachi to cook it on, frozen shrimp, fish and even lobster. As I went through the inventory, I determined that I'd be able to make more than a few decent meals.
After a short sail, the guys were ready for drinks. I set about preparing a prettily arranged hors d'oeuvre plate. I did the best I could do with salami, cheese, saltines (quickly soggy in the sea air), olives and pickles. It wasn't much, but my effort was appreciated, and there was plenty of gin. We joined them for a drink, then descended to the galley to prepare dinner while they had second and third rounds.
My first night's masterpiece was shrimp creole. There was no garlic or bay leaf, but I had plenty of onions, peppers and tomatoes. If you begin to prepare a meal within nose shot of your eaters by sautéing lots of onions and peppers (and if you have it, garlic), they will come to your table with open minds and hearts -- and a ready palate. After sautéing the aromatics for quite a while, I added canned tomatoes and the seasonings on hand: garlic salt, Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces, lime juice, vermouth and pepper. I cooked down the mixture until it was nice and savory, then threw in the shrimp. Even served over Minute Rice, it was a hit. The men had not skimped on wine, so we dressed up our meal with a chilled dry white bordeaux. We were off to a good start. We drank coffee on deck under the stars, and soon we all slept, Barbara and I on deck, the guys down below.
Every morning at dawn I would roll off the deck into the Caribbean, swim a mile while Barbara got the coffee going, then hit the galley stove. We'd make eggs and bacon or pancakes for breakfast, then, the dishes done, take our sunbathing stations on the bow while the men sailed the ketch to a beautiful spot. We'd drop anchor and snorkel for a while, then make sandwiches for lunch and repeat the morning activities in the afternoon. We had to drop anchor by 5, always in some enchanted bay in time for cocktails.
I continued to impress our hosts. On the second night I made a dazzling potato-cheese soup with potatoes, onions, celery, wine, milk and cheese. The guys grilled steaks on the hibachi and I marinated canned green beans in a vinaigrette. I gussied up canned fruit cocktail with a warm custard sauce sweetened with maple syrup and spiked with rum. The number of culinary delights you can create given eggs, milk and cheese is remarkable.
On our last night, we cooked the lobsters. We paid a child who came up alongside our boat in a dugout canoe to go buy us some butter (at vast expense), and made a terrific meal, which everyone fell to with great abandon. We were so content that when a heavy rainstorm washed Barbara and me, battening down the hatches, into the galley in the middle of the night, we didn't really mind. It made sense to bed down on my last night in this tropical paradise in the tiny kitchen that had been the means of my being there.
Zester Daily contributor Martha Rose Shulman is the award-winning author of more than 25 cookbooks. Her latest is "The Very Best of Recipes for Health," published by Rodale.
Photo: Vessel in the Caribbean Sea. Credit: istockphoto / Gergana Valcheva
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But, one of the memories that sticks out most is of the food:
One morning I opened a cooler on the back deck, expecting to find bottles of water and the fabulous grapefruit-flavored soda, Ting. Instead, I found a cooler full of live spiny lobsters! That same morning, our captain had made several very impressive hundred-foot free dives to collect them for us! That night they tasted fabulous, and of course the catch couldn't have been fresher.