Most people would say I'm a pretty good cook. My favorite way of cooking is to take a bunch of ingredients that seem to go together and create some new way of combining them into (hopefully) something tasty. The boat is great for that kind of experimentation, as I can't just go to the store and buy what I need for some recipe or another; I have to figure out something to make with what we have. After spending a week aboard Scappatella, my sister Suzanne named me "The Kitchen Witch" for my experiments in the kitchen. The idea for a dish is often generated while I'm zoning out doing something sort of passive like snorkeling or swimming...or during the rare moment we get to experience a "lazy" sail. And typically it's when I'm hungry. The actual "recipe" itself is always created real-time, as I'm throwing it together. It's often a bit of a mad rush at the end, and the kitchen, er galley, typically looks like the Tasmanian Devil came through. It's a bit of a crap shoot, but the odds are usually in my favor in the kitchen.

Except for the simpler things. Like cornbread. Rice. Corned Beef. All dishes I have royally screwed up aboard Scappatella. There's just something about cooking simple things that I seem to have the hardest time with. Maybe it's that there's no challenge in them, so I get bored. Probably, though, it's related to my inability (resistance?) to follow directions. Take rice, for example. Simple, right? 2 cups of water, a cup of rice, some butter, and simmer for 20 minutes or whatever. But I screw it up so often that at home Louis usually ends up making the rice. It's become his "job". (I don't dare ask him on the boat as there's already an inbalance of jobs...although I'm catching up lately!)

Or corned beef...how hard can that be? Put it in a pot with some veggies & potatoes and boil it for however long it says on the package, and voila, right? Not. The WORST meal I've ever cooked in my life was last year's Christmas dinner aboard Scappatella. Salty, tough, corned beef and flavorless, mushy boiled vegetables. (In all fairness, though, I think the cow had something to do with the beef part.) But what was I thinking anyway, serving Corned Beef for Christmas dinner? I guess it sounded homey, and Louis and I wanted homey as we were missing family and friends. It was fitting, though, as it was such a crappy Christmas that having a lousy meal to go with it was what was called for.

Well, today, it's cornbread. Burned on the bottom, dense like a hockey-puck on the inside, and the nicely browned top layer is so greasy I can almost slide it off by itself. How can I screw up cornbread? It was a mix; you just add egg, milk and butter. Ok, I didn't measure the butter 'cuz it was too hard (as in rock solid); so I "eyed" it, erring on the high side. I mean, who ever heard of corn bread being too buttery? (It is). And, then there's the oven, with it's scary high-output burner that always sounds like it's going to explode or something. During this 30 minute baking project I had to mess with the temperature gauge 5 or 6 times to try and keep it at temperature. It went from 250 to 425 in my effort to keep it at 350.

I'm sure I'll get the hang of the oven eventually. But I will still probably screw up the cornbread. Maybe I'd better stick to my tried and true kitchen-witch way of cooking.

So....Soy-Marinated Grilled Pork and Roasted Eggplant over a bed of Asian Rice Noodles, Mint and Napa Cabbage - no problem!

But a nice hunk of cornbread to go with it - no can do! (It wouldn't go anyway)