Freezers are working overtime... What is going on?
On passage we prefer to spend as little time in the kitchen/galley as possible. We want to have comfy meals available that just need to be heated up. Not just rice'n'beans'n'sauce!
Some boats do a lot of canning, and after the initial chore, it takes no energy to keep the meals for a long time. We tried (fail!), and we tried home-canned meals on other boats, politely declining seconds.
Canned food from the supermarket is an option, but is often super salty, full of MSG or other chemicals to enhance flavour. Yuck.
On this boat the passage meals are precooked, maybe with less thickener in the sauce, to be added later. Then the meals (not the starches like pasta, rice, etc) are filled into squarish plastic containers and frozen. In the small, low energy, freezers it takes days to freeze it solid. Then the meals (=bricks) are taken out of the containers and put in zip-lock bags, with a sticky note to tell us what is in it, and double bagged in another zip-lock. Our little 40 quart freezers can now hold 30 meals each.
Here is Silvie laying those bricks (meals) tightly in the freezer, plus making sure the inventory list is up to date:
