Kaimusailing

It was cold drizzle day, but up North in Crisfield the temperatures are 10 to 15 degrees colder. We will touch freezing here now and then, up there they will hit 20 degrees regularly. Cornelia Marie texted me about Sunsplash’s electric bill. $52. She said most boats are 5-10 dollars. I’m paying for Sunsplash like she’s paying for her house electric. I said I’m OK with the bill. I was missing Crisfield, but I can wait till April. I said maybe Kaimu can join the fleet in Somers Cove Marina.
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I stayed aboard and inside with the little propane heater keeping the galley warm, sort of. It had become difficult to get the heater lit with its starter button, so I have to use a barbecue lighter and the starter button to get the flame started. There is a delicate timing to get it to light. Life shouldn’t be this difficult.
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I had leftover golobki and tried to microwave one of them aboard in the galley. The 400 amp hours of battery should be able to handle it, but no, the microwave kicked off due to low voltage. It could be due to bad connections between the batteries.
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There is a sticking point at freezing. A lot of thermal energy has to be removed for water to freeze. It also takes the same amount of energy to thaw. So, when your marina is starting to freeze, it takes a long time, it might not totally freeze, it takes really cold air to freeze water. And when the thaw happens, it takes a lot of really warm air to melt the ice.
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It was time for me to organize another Pizza Night, but it was chilly and it’s hard to get going in the chill. My screen protectors for the Galaxy S20+ were due in the post office, so I borrowed Robert’s vehicle to go to the post office. It wasn’t there. I went to the small local Winn-Dixie to shop. I didn’t get pizza ingredients, I got ingredients for a soup. It was a kale and kielbasa soup by the NY Times.
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I had to bring all the apparatus and ingredients up to the Breezeway. There was no one there, not even the new renter. I had a cutting board that needed cleaning, so I washed it off with the hose out of the building. Get organized, I decided to prep all the ingredients and then start cooking them in the big stock pot on the single electric hot plate.
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What to cut up first, well the kale will be last, it is a big bag of kale. The onions are simple game for me, just peel them and throw away the skins, they have already been cut across on the longitude, cut across the equator, big slices, then continue with latitude slices. 8mm slices. Then stack them up, big slice on bottom, radially sever them.
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The garlic is peeled and minced. The kale comes up last, awful. From Winn-Dixie the Kale bunch is huge, just take half, and that is more than enough. Trim the leaves from the huge stems, and, this I learned recently, roll up the leaves in a tight roll, then shave off it. Keep going. Kale is good for you. You end up with a big bowl of kale shreds.
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The kielbasa is split lengthwise and the pieces are split again, then crosscut them into little spoon sized bits. 3 potatoes are cubed. The kielbasa, onion, and potatoes are put in the stock pot with a drizzle of olive oil and brought up to temperature. Then the kale is put into the pot and the pot is full right up to the top. The juice from a can of chick peas is poured to give some water to steam the vegetables.
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I return to Kaimu to get the pepper grinder and open a can of Cento crushed tomatoes, return to the Breezeway. The kale is starting to wilt and I mix the pot up making sure the bottom isn’t burnt. When the kale is fully wilted there is room for the chick peas and crushed tomatoes. 4 cups of water and a heaping tablespoon of Better Than Bouillon, chicken flavor and one of mirepoix flavor are added and mixed in. The pepper is dusted over the surface and the soup is allowed to simmer for a while. I text the Dirty Dozen that there will be soup in the Breezeway in lieu of pizza.
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Eloisa and her dog Blue arrived and she brought a second hot plate, some Irish butter, and a loaf of artisan bread. I have the bowls on hand that I raise the pizza dough balls in, but only two spoons. She gets packs of plastic ware. The aroma coming from the soup pot is making me want to get some right away, but that would not be polite. I get some anyway. It is good. I get a slice of bread fried in butter. Yummy.
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Henrick arrives with Helicopter Dave and Roughrider Lynn. The pizza oven is lit with its cover off to warm the Breezeway while the temperature outside drops. A box of merlot is drained. The conversation wanders around significant pilots and their exploits. Unbelievably the stock pot is almost empty, all that soup is gone.
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The next day clean up was done right at the Breezeway using the outside garden hose and warming dishwater on the hotplate. I went for a moderate bike ride and waited for my replacement laptop chassis to come in by FedEx. They arrived and I unpacked them and saved the bubble wrap, there must have been 50 feet of it to wrap around the two laptops.
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On board Kaimu I powered the chassis up and swapped working hard drives in them. They powered up and worked fine, but were BIOS password locked and wifi and bluetooth were disabled in BIOS. Not to worry, I merely have to swap motherboards with the two damaged laptops.
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I also realized that with yesterday’s soup all gone I had to cook again. I had my eye on a seafood chowder recipe from Venus de Milo restaurant in Swansea, MA. Gee, Cuddily was in Massachusetts before she came down to Crisfield and she likes to make fish chowder, so I sent the recipe to her and told her where it came from. She said that was where her wedding reception had been long ago.
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I went on the restaurant’s website and it looks like the pandemic has really hurt them. The owner wants to sell. Interestingly, Emeril Lagasse, who comes from nearby Fall River, worked at the restaurant when he was starting out. I couldn’t get Venus de Milo’s minestrone recipe, but Emeril has several on line and they are probably good.
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I put the ingredient list on the new phone and borrowed Robert’s car to shop, do laundry, and refill a propane tank. First I hit the Post Office and got my package of screen protectors and a birthday card from my favorite sister. Then I went to the laundry and cashed 5 bucks for quarters and put my load in and started it. Out I went to the Winn-Dixie to shop for ingredients for the chowder. Onion, celery, red potatoes, light cream, tomato puree, clam juice, scallops, shrimp, and lobster, only I bought imitation crab for the lobster. I was up to $46 for a pot of soup, sheesh.
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Back to the laundry, put it in the dryer, hit the road for Tractor Supply, refill propane tank, $18 now, back to laundry, fold, head to the yard. Park at Kaimu, offload propane and laundry. Forgot that Eloisa had way laid me at the laundry, she just happened by, and gave me a stick and a half of Irish butter. I had to make a roux and had butter, but it kind of hit me as I left the grocers, what had I forgot? I had butter, but that Irish butter, make a roux with that, it will be amazing. The butter was now in the laundry basket as I drove up to the Breezeway with the ingredients. That meant I had to come back, but there were other items I needed, like the pepper grinder.
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At the Breezeway I set out the ingredients and decided to prep the veggies, thin slice celery, small dice a white onion, and fine mince the rest of the head of garlic. Put them in one small bowl. Dice red potatoes, small dice, set aside in two small bowls. Put the frozen scallops in a saucepan of water, the scallops are in a sealed plastic bag, let them thaw out. The bag of small shrimp is frozen, but it is easy to separate them while they are in the bag, let them try to thaw. The imitation crab is in a block that is frozen and I work at the block, remove it from the bag, and tear it apart into pieces of fake crab that have to be cut smaller, soup size.
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I had to buy clam juice in 1 cup bottles and I needed about a quart. Expensive. Capped, but not twist off, searching for maybe a tool to rip the tops off. Eloisa comes in, preceded by her dog, Blue, and runs off to get a “church key”. She returns, the tops come off, the juice goes into the stock pot. For some reason the hotplate is not up to the task of boiling the juice. It’s going to take all afternoon.
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I remembered using the pizza oven as a heater, just pull off the top, light it, and let it rip, lots of heat. I did so. The stock pot was not boiling, just wafting off vapors. I threw the scallops in and let them poach. After a while I tasted one. Let them cook more. When I had one that was cooked I tried to ladle the rest out into a large plastic bowl. If only I had a slotted spoon. Eloisa ran and got one. Thank you. Now put the shrimp in. The semi frozen shrimp just made the stock pot stop, no boiling, no vapors. I waited a while and realized the shrimp was precooked, I just had to get them out into the bowl with the scallops. Then the same with the imitation crab meat. Exactly the same.
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The potatoes were supposed to be next, but I needed boiling stock. I moved the stock pot onto the hot pizza stones, exposed with the oven top off. Surely they would make the pot boil. They did not. I now put the prepared onion, celery, and garlic in the saucepan with Irish butter. It quickly warmed up and started to cook. I wanted to cover it so that the veggies could sweat. Eloisa was going to find aluminum foil to make a cover, but I found one of the pizza pans and it served the purpose.
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The stock pot on the pizza stones never boiled. I tasted a potato cube and it was not cooked. The onions, etc. were removed from the hot plate and the stock pot was put there. Strange, the hot plate had no trouble boiling anything, but now the stock pot was somehow refusing to boil.
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I changed the regimen of the recipe. They wanted tomato puree mixed into the onion mixture, then add flour to make the roux. I added the flour before doing anything further with the onion mixture. Let it cook, stir it, scrape the bottom, keep the veggies and the congealing flour moving. If you can go 5 minutes it will make all the difference. I wasn’t counting.
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The stock pot was almost vaporing again, sitting up on the pizza stones. I began ladling cups of stock into the saucepan, mixing with a spoon, getting the roux to get to know it’s new stock, mix, mix, mix, and it thickens, add more, keep at it. We have run out of stock.
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Somehow I had inadvertently bought about twice as many seafood ingredients, but still only had 1 batch of stock to make the soup, so I now needed to get more liquid. I used the outside garden hose to fill a prep bowl with about 3 cups of water. I added that to the roux and waited while it came up to temperature.
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I waited and continued to mix the roux from time to time. It was getting close to dinner time, but as yet I had no customers. At some point I decided to add the roux to the stock pot and mix. I tasted. Hmm. I added some garlic salt. I let Eloisa taste. She thought it could use some sherry. Well we all could.
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I kept stirring and thought maybe now I can add the tomato. In it went, I ladled some of the soup to clean out the can, mix, mix, mix. I tasted the concoction. Not too bad. Eloisa was on the phone with someone and elected to drift out behind the Breezeway. Like to have her opinion. Keep mixing and scraping and stirring. I of course tasted it every step of the way. I made a small bowl and added a dollop of the cream, mixed the bowl, tasted. Good, poured the rest of the cream into the stock pot, mixed. Mixed it up real good.
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She came in from the phone call and I suggested she try some, look at it, it’s much different now with the cream. I had unplugged the hotplate so the soup wouldn’t boil and break the creamy liquid. Yeah, it was good. Henrik came in and had some of the soup and said it was excellent. People are so polite.
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Robert had some and said it was very good. He is a trained cook/chef and I respect his judgment, even if he is just being polite.
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Helicopter Dave and Roughrider Lynn never showed up, but I knew they couldn’t leave their UK real estate show on PBS. The stock pot was now low, not depleted, but maybe half of the soup had been consumed. Eloisa and I had a long conversation. It’s like me and Cuddily, but now I am the counselor.
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The next day the utensils were cleaned up and 3 tupperwares were filled with the chowder and into the fridge it went. I was receiving texts such as, soup was awesome. This recipe is a keeper. Eloisa brought me to a small bakery about 2 miles away from the boatyard and we had had coffee, she a muffin, me a cheese danish. We went for a drive and I opted to return to the boatyard and work on my laptops. Eloisa took off, who knows where.
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It was chilly so I thought maybe I could do the work in Kaimu’s dinette, but there was more room in the Breezeway. I had two pristine laptops that were BIOS locked and three damaged laptops. My plan was to swap motherboards to eliminate the BIOS problem. I tore down one of the pristine machines and kept careful notes on where things went when putting it back together. Then I tore down a damaged laptop. I began putting the pristine laptop together with the replacement mother board and it was a very tedious repair. I was careful. I estimate it took 5 hours. I packed up my stuff and left the Breezeway just as the renter returned.
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I am typing on the pristine repaired laptop and all looks good. It’s like a new laptop. I am not eager to tackle laptop #2. The image is of the chowder in the stock pot. Notice the pink color.