Meal time on board the Plastiki…

This delicious looking beef dish was pre-made with the help of Jennifer Tuck and the SF food community who all played a huge role in gathering up a lot of the food to take on board, here she tells us how she got involved and the challenges and solutions they faced…

In January Jo tweeted essentially a casting call to the San Fran Culinary Community for help provisioning the Plastiki. I work with a local organic sustainable meal kit company called Cook! SF. Cook and owner Nona Lim and I decided to partner on the project and help Jo meet her 3 goals: 1) eat well/nutritiously 2) eat sustainably 3) eat relatively affordably. Jo also described long journeys where she’d live for months on freeze-dried food and the ill consequence that has on the body. Yikes, indeed! So Nona and I enthusiastically took up the challenge. We asked ourselves how can we feed the Plastiki crew fresh, local, organic foods from the Bay Area for 90 days … with no refrigeration?

The answer – jarring and dehydration, the natural way! We definitely did not want to purchase canned meats or veggies. Dehydrating veggies fresh from the farms seemed the best option, plus lightweight for the boat – a big plus! So I began calling local farmers to discuss custom dehydrating. Finding Bill Crepps from Everything Under the Sun in Winters, CA was a dream come true. Bill was willing to dehydrate any and all veggies he could get his hands on – and the experimentation began! Bill’s dried veggies are so delicious that we snacked on the mandarins, kiwis, eggplant and kale CONSTANTLY as we packed and loaded the boat. Bill would call me and say, “Jennifer, I’ve got a lead on some overripe kiwis from the next farm over – they won’t make it to market. Want me to dry them?” Of course I said yes to everything and that’s how we got the lovely variety of fruits and veggies on board. Thank you, Bill!

Bill Crepps and his daughter Elizabeth at the market

I made lots of taste-testing trips to the farmers markets, then turned the kitchen into a test kitchen, rehydrating Bill’s veggies at lightning speed in my own pressure cooker – the primary means of cooking on board the Plastiki. The veggies came back to life perfectly every time, just delish! (Here I must thank Lorna Sass (www.lornasass.com) for writing wonderful pressure cooker books – we sent two on the boat, I recommend Cooking Under Pressure). During this test phase we often had samples of Bill’s dried veggies on board as the final touches were being put on the boat. The sometimes wrinkled, shriveled peppers, braising mix and odd dried fruits were a popular topic of conversation with the crew’s many visitors, who no doubt thought “How on earth are they going to eat this?” Honestly, all it takes is a pressure cooker and a commitment to tossing culinary caution to the wind. No doubt the crew is doing this with great success!

Dried Mandarins

I also reached out to many other Northern California farmers through the Farmers Market Ferry Plaza. Farmers are proud of their smaller, organic operations and were enthusiastic about lending a hand to the Plastiki, whether by donating 15 dozen eggs like Nigel from Eatwell Farms did. Our other vendors like Yellow + Blue wine carries a strong environmental mission and happily donated three cases of red wine, boxed of course. It was a truly heart-warming experience getting to know these farmers and seeing them embrace the Plastiki mission to change behavior around single-use throwaway plastics.

For the meats, we ordered more than a hundred pounds of organic grass fed lamb and beef from Marin Sun Farms. In the Cook! commercial kitchen in Oakland, head chef Isabel and the team helped us jar more than 110 huge mason jars of beef bourguignon, lamb ragout, Thai chicken curry, lamb tagine and meats in stock for the crew to use in their own recipes. The crew is also sampling lots of different organic jerkys and sausages from Fatted Calf and Marin Sun Farms. David T INSISTED on having bacon (Jo begged me to find bacon that could last the journey, you know – men and their bacon!). So I tracked down bacon from Father’s Country Ham in Kentucky and bought 24 packages for David – in flavors like hickory smoke, bourbon and apple cinnamon. Hope it hits the spot.

Chef Isabel jarring the food

Eatwell Farm

Fatted Calf

Take a look at the Eat Well Guide we created for the crew. It holds background on Nona and I, ingredients, nutrition information, recipes and more. Equipping the tiny galley was fun. We made sure they had the little things like wasabi paste, sushi rolling mats, chopsticks, etc. Dessert time on the Plastiki has the potential to be very yummy once they get the swing of using the solar oven. In fact, the sun should be just about right for baking these days. We emphasized whole grains, veggies and overall healthy eating with our menu planning, but no doubt they’ll have fun taking a break from the healthy eats, baking up brownies, cookies and breads from scratch out on the deck under the “live” mast. Who knew you could have a canopy of kale on a mast? Thanks Inka!

As a native Californian, I appreciate that our state grows half of our nation’s fruits, vegetables and nuts and take advantage of farmers markets and smaller organic markets in our local Haight Ashbury neighborhood. Plus it encourages cooking, which can be a source of great adventure. There’s always something new and interesting on the stove top and gadgets galore. This week’s favourite is my Champion juicer, which is turning out many delicious dandelion green-lime-ginger-beet juices. Born in Belmont Shore in Long Beach, CA, I love the ocean and try to spend as much time there as possible, kite-boarding, stand up paddling, diving, anything. It’s so vast and easily overlooked in terms of protection, so it was easy to get on board with the Plastiki project.

About Cook!
Cook! is passionate about local, sustainable food practices. We ask people to think of Cook! as their speedy sous chef. We source delicious ingredients from local farms and deliver wholesome meal kits with pre-measured ingredients that take just 20 minutes to prepare. Sustainability is integral to the Cook! mission. After all, future generations should enjoy the same access to a wide variety of high quality natural foods that we do today. Sustainability is about creating a just food system. This means celebrating and protecting our local food sources, for example, from overfishing, or harmful agricultural practices. It means working toward a model where people from all walks of life have access to affordable, healthy foods.

Nona from Cook! says
“Cook! is really excited to be part of the Plastiki project. As a company that delivers organic gourmet meal kits with fresh, local ingredients, we were excited to bring together local ingredients that the Plastiki crew members can take with them on their journey. It was really wonderful how the community rallied around the project and so many farms and local producers gave generously of their produce and time. One of the interesting challenges in pulling together the food for Plastiki was in figuring out how we would preserve all of the food for three months without any refrigeration. We took a risk in deciding to pressure jar lots of meat — which is a complete first for us, since we have never had the need to jar meat before. It was a fun learning process, and at the end of it, there were more than a hundred jars of wonderful organic meats, some simply cooked, and some made into delightful thai green curry, lamb ragu, beef bourguinon and mexican green chile beef stew! We also tried to incorporate lots of healthy ingredients and interesting grains such as quinoa, different types of rice (including an organic pink rice), amaranth and more. We think that eating healthly, local, organic and almost fresh would be a first for an expedition of this duration.
It has been great pulling this together, and we are really excited to see how the journey develops.”