Kaimusailing

It took me a couple of days to recover from overdoing it on the bicycle. I was sore and stiff. I ran out of wine and then ran out of cheese. The next morning was a ham and cheese sandwich without the cheese. Then it was an egg sandwich the next day, the bread was now gone. I was not starving but my diet was restricted to leftover chili with rice, peanut butter on crackers.
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Thus I was forced to go out and restock my basic foodstuffs. I took it easy on the bike and returned with eggs, cheese, and ham, along with avocados, lime, iron tablets, bread, and a large package of chicken thighs, on sale for $.99/lb.
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When I saw the chicken on sale I immediately thought of making more chicken mole, but by the time I returned to SUNSPLASH the cooking was canceled, I made a ham and cheese sandwich paired with pinot noir.
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The alcohol stove works perfectly well until you want to really start cooking and then keeping it lit for long periods of time becomes a problem. I have been able to simmer things for an hour with maybe a pint of fuel in it. It holds a liter in each burner, but that much alcohol starts costing a lot. The pandemic drove the price of denatured alcohol up so that in the local hardware store a quart was $10.99.
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The Coleman Camp Grill that I had used in the past had one bad feature, the adapter to attach a propane cylinder to the grill mandated that the cylinder be located behind the stove to the right. In SUNSPLASH’s galley there is not enough room, making it difficult to position the stove, also making it difficult to change out cylinders when they go empty. I solved this problem by borrowing a hacksaw from Eve and cutting the adapter right in the middle and putting 2 feet of rubber hose in place. Now the cylinder can be located anywhere convenient.
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The propane grill runs forever on those little 1 lb. cylinders, so cooking for an extended period of time is possible. My package of chicken thighs needs a larger cooking pot than usual and I will use the pressure cooker, and while I’m doing so, I can cook some brown rice too. I need chicken stock for the rice and a little for the mole sauce. The thighs will produce the stock while getting pressure cooked and the rice will absorb a lot of the stock. I want the thighs to be well done and falling apart. Next the chicken meat will be simmered in mole negro along with diced red onion.
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All this requires lazy me to stow away the alcohol stove and install the propane grill in its place.
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The next day was spent trying to recover from the ordeal. Stowing the alcohol stove was simple and quick. I put the propane grill in its place and searched for the smaller of the two grill top grills. I searched all over. I tore up the interior of the cabin and found other things, but not the little grill piece. I ended up finding it laying in the grill. Grrr.
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The pressure cooker had a seal with it. I could not get the seal seated in the groove in the lid. I put the seal on the lip of the cooker and hoped it would seal things up, but if not, it would just have to cook longer. The chicken thighs were seared in the bottom of the pressure cooker, then removed and set aside. A folding vegetable steaming sieve was placed in the bottom of the cooker and a cup of brown rice was mounded in the middle of the steamer. The idea was to prevent rice from burning on the bottom of the pot. Next the thighs went in along with 3 cups of water. The seal and lid were put on and I let it build up pressure. It was not to happen, though. No pressure, the seal didn’t seal. No matter, let it cook. After about an hour or hour and a quarter the thighs were falling apart and the rice was puffed up. The thighs went onto a platter to cool, the rice went into a smaller pot with a little more water to cook some more.
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Next I set the rice aside and started the mole in another small pot. Mole negro paste, roja salsa, and some water were heated and mixed together. In went a diced red onion. The chicken was deboned, deskinned, and cut into small pieces, added to the mole sauce. It simmered and the flavors blended together. I had a small portion along with some of the rice. Yummy.
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The next day was a marathon of trying to get burned rice and chicken fat off the bottom of the pressure cooker. There were plenty of other dishes to clean, but I like doing that and eventually the galley was spic and span. Now I have about a quart of chicken mole and maybe two cups of brown rice in the fridge. A little goes a long way.
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I continued to watch motorcycle restorations on YouTube and the one channel I watch most is put up by 2vintage. He records the process and I thought, how nice of him to go through all that trouble. Very detailed, he shows every little step. Then I realized he is not just doing this for us, he is documenting the tear down so that he can put it all back together. His channel does have a lot of ads.
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The NFL schedule came out and the NY Jets will play against the top 4 scoring offenses of last year in their first 6 games. The latter part of the schedule is not so brutal. I can see them winning ten games, maybe more. They could win ten games and not make the playoffs.
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I have to say something about working with the Veteran’s Administration online. It is a nightmare trying to log into while at the same time having to log into a second government account, sheesh. It took hours.
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For some reason I was surprised that Webb Chiles was out sailing again. I kind of lost touch with what he was doing. There he was in Cape Lookout Bight, a nice little anchorage that I have never been in and until now didn’t know existed. He stayed for a couple days and is on his way back to Hilton Head with light headwinds, but he will get some nice fair winds and following seas pretty soon.
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The image is one that I didn’t use from a couple weeks ago. I did not frame the shot correctly and it had maybe 5 degrees of horizontal tilt. Now I used the image manipulation app to “arbitrarily rotate” the image and crop the results. Now it looks like I knew what I was doing when I took the photo. It’s the storm clouds to the East while the sun sets in the West.