mark - yeah it's on the way
Rexx - not sure if I had silverbeet or not, but I ate everything that I was offered or put in front of me.
golddog - going to have to delay a full response on that as provisioning is one of my favorite sailing topics and I have many thoughts on it. In a nutshell:
Eating strategy is same as poker: it depends.
Sometimes regular meals, sometimes everyone on their own. For longer passages, there is usually at least one regular shared meal tho - often a late lunch or early dinner.
In the case of foraging, meal composition depends on the people and the resources available. If you have access to a microwave (a luxury for sure due to its electrical demands) and ample storage space, then it is very easy to just do whatever you want, including individual serving meals. If not, it's much easier to default to shared pot meals like chili, etc.
Some of the variables that drive the strategy are: length of trip, # of people on boat, watch schedules, space on board, fridge/freezer availability & space if available, dietary restrictions, personal preferences, whether or not there is a dedicated cook, crew experience, etc
Here are a few examples:
When de cap, de cap bro, and I did the Hawaii -> Seattle run, it was 23 days. We had a stovetop and an oven. We were doing 2x 4hr shifts per person. We had a fair amount of space available for storage, and a decent size fridge/freezer. We all ate pretty much everything. No relevant dietary restrictions. We shared some of the duties but de cap bro did most of the cooking while de cap & I focused more on the cleanup. de cap did some killer muffins, tho. We all had multiple passages under our belts, so things went pretty smoothly.
When I crossed Ecuador -> French Polynesia with the Australians, it was also 23 days. Very similar to the Hawaii -> Seattle passage, except we had a strict rotation for whose turn it was to cook, clean, etc. The only baking was when I made bread, which everyone loved, but no one else wanted to put in the effort to do. We ate a lot of meat because Aussies love meat. We had a microwave but almost never used it. On another trip with the most of the same crew on the same boat, we bought something like 30 meat pies in New Caledonia for the passage to the east coast of Oz, and probably a third of my meals that week just involved nuking a chicken pie.
On a previous Atlantic crossing with stops in Bermuda & Azores, I was with two other USA#1ers on an enormous catamaran. We had tons of space, including tons of fridge & freezer space. Enormous solar panels and a huge battery bank let us use the microwave whenever we wanted. They enjoyed the finer things in life, so we were eating stuff like duck, truffles, etc.
Comparing the above to this coming passage, there will be a lot more constraints this time. There will be five of us, on a smaller catamaran. The cat was built as a racing cat, not a cruising cat. It was fitted out for charters. That means that storage space will be more limited than usual. It also means that there are two fairly small fridge/freezer combo units, but the freezers in each are little half shelf things with very little space. Very similar to this:
so I'm not counting on being able to freeze anything, and only refrigerate some stuff. We have one vegetarian and at least two mostly-vegetarians. Not sure about the last person. I'm an omnivore but I am fine going without meat for a few weeks.
The oven is also having issues, unable to go above 160C/320F (root cause unknown) and my friend has pretty much says he doesn't intend to fix it unless it's a easy/quick fix, so that pretty much rules out baking bread & muffins, sadly. No microwave, but the stovetop works fine.
What this means is that provisioning will be focused on non-refrigerated proteins like beans, lentils, quinoa. Fishing becomes more important for fresh protein because of the lack of cold storage, so I'll be running at least two lines. We'll have some cans of chicken but not many. Nuts (which I can't eat) will be more heavily provisioned than usual. I'll get something else for myself.
5 people x 20 days (estimate) x 3 meals/day = 300 meal units. Since we'll likely be doing at least dinner/lunches mostly together due to being well rested (5 people makes watches lots easier to handle), that means looking at about 40 group meals to plan out and try to maximize both nutrition and variety.
OK I'm cutting myself off here, otherwise I'll just go on and on forever.
In a nutshell, this passage is requiring more planning than usual due to these restrictions: no oven, mostly veg people, limited storage space, limited fridge space, zero freezer space.
So I'll be researching easy quinoa/seitan recipes and reminding myself how to properly cook lentils over the next couple of days.