Galley Day
The Picton Castle has a full-time professional cook. She works very long hours, starting at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast and ending at 6:00 p.m. when dinner is served. In order to make her job easier, she gets three assistants every day--one from each watch--to cart things up from the cargo hold, wash, peel, and chop vegetables, and to clean up the galley and wash all of the dishes after every meal.
The cook gets Monday off, and she also takes a few days off here and there, plus she rarely works when we are at anchor. On these days, the galley slaves, or rather, assistants, cook as well as assist and clean up. There are a few crew members who know their way around a kitchen, and therefore we, since I am included in this group, always seem to work when the cook takes her day off.
Galley days are posted on the notice board weekly, and I was looking for my name when the new list was up because I knew it was coming up soon. I was really hoping that my day would be later in the week rather than earlier, as we were sailing in quite hard conditions, with high winds and big seas. Unfortunately, since Monday was the cook's day off, and it was Sunday, it turned out that I was on the next day. That night I hoped that the weather would calm down over night.
At 6:30 a.m. the wake-up person from the current watch came by my bunk, and as is usual, the first thing I did was to try to figure out what the seas were doing. We had been sailing for the last few days on almost a beam reach, which meant that the wind was coming from the side, and makes the ship lean over the most. I confirmed that this was still the case as I was definitely sleeping against the side of my bunk. I got up, dressed and stepped out into the early morning to see that in fact we were in the biggest seas so far on this trip! And I had to be in charge of feeding everyone in these conditions.
Your day in the galley can be better or worse depending on who your fellow assistants are. Some people are more agreeable than others, some like galley day, and others hate it and sulk all day in the scullery, washing dishes. We had a great crew that day, so at least it was going to be fun.
Breakfast was the usual assortment of dry cereals, milk, juices, and today, scrambled eggs. We make all of our own bread, but for breakfast the only thing is tortilla wraps, which people sometimes use for peanut butter and jam rolls. (Eating dry cereal in the conditions of that day is always a challenge. It is difficult enough to get your cereal to pour out of the bag without it being blown out of the bowl by the 25 kt. wind (we usually eat outside) before you can wet it down with some milk (powdered, reconstituted). Then you have to find somewhere to sit where you can anchor yourself with your feet or elbow or something so that you can have both hands to eat.) For the galley crew, all we had to do afterward was to collect dishes and wash them, and to put everything away.
Next, lunch. The cook suggested soup. This may not seem to be too smart in such conditions, but it is easier to eat out of a bowl than a plate on such days. We discussed some options and decided that we would make clam chowder. One of the galley slaves went to the cargo hold to rummage for canned clams, one washed and peeled potatoes, and I started a batch of bread.
At this time, I should try to describe, really, what the galley is like. It is small, about the size of an apartment kitchen. It has a large cast-iron stove that was built in 1870 and was converted to run off diesel a few years ago. The cooking surface has hot spots and cool ones and you just have to move pots around to find the correct temperature, but the surface never gets hot enough for me. It also has two ovens, each with 2 shelves, for a total of four shelves to bake in. The temperature of the shelves is: too hot, just a bit hotter than I would like, just a bit cooler than I would like, and warm, but not warm enough to actually bake anything. When the ship is moving, everything on the stove and in the ovens, of course, moves along with it.
OK, so try to imagine the picture: you are in an apartment-sized kitchen, and today it is tilted to one side because of the wind, plus it is rocking back and forth (sometimes violently) and going up and down about 10 to 15 feet. And soon 45 people are coming for lunch and dinner and you have to feed them, and meals can't be late because they are timed to when the watches change.
Making bread in these conditions wasn't too bad: Take a large bowl, add 8 cups of water, yeast, sugar, salt, powdered milk, some oil, and flour. Mix a batter and beat with a whisk for a few minutes, and then start adding flour to make the actual dough. The only challenge is to keep the bowl in one spot on the miniscule counter. Then you dump it out onto the kneading board and it stays put pretty well. At least you have something to hold on to as you knead, and somehow or other, you can tune out the constant motion. When the dough was ready for first rising we started on the soup.
In two very large pots we browned some onions on the slow range. Everything takes at least twice as long to do as I am used to, so just browning about 6 chopped onions took about 20 minutes. Then we added cubed potatoes and got them just starting to cook, which took an additional 15 minutes or so. Then we added the juice from the clams and several pitchers of reconstituted milk. The milk we use is not "instant" skim milk, but full cream powder. It tastes OK, but is a pain to make because you have to start by making a paste and then thinning it with water; otherwise you get really lumpy milk, and in fact most people still don't get this and so usually it is lumpy.
By using two large pots, and anchoring them on the stove with guide rails that have a special name like everything on a ship and I can't remember, we were able to keep the soup in the pots despite the fact that it was sloshing around. While the broth came to a simmer (which took about an hour), I punched down the risen bread dough and shaped it into loaves. Then we added the clam meat and worked on seasoning. This is actually a challenge because you have to multiply everything by several times as compared to how you would season even a dinner-party-sized dish (for, say, eight people). Instead of a few shakes of salt, you do ten.
The bread went into the oven while the counters on the aloha deck (the lower deck at the stern) were set with bowls and cutlery. Because of the uneven temperature, the bread has to be rotated through all of the oven shelves to get even cooking and browning, but eventually I had 8 loaves of fresh bread. We carried the huge pots of soup, one at a time with two people so you have one hand for the pot and one for handrails or whatever else you need to balance yourself, and rang the lunch bell. People always seem to be starving on the ship, so everyone runs to get in line. People also get really excited about fresh bread, so lunch went down really well, except for the few people that never like what is served. Some even said it was the best chowder they ever had, which just shows what kind of an appetite you can work up at sea.
OK, lunch was out of the way, so it was time to get ready for dinner. We had decided that we were going to something with chicken, and we had retrieved two huge bags of breasts from the freezer to thaw out over the day. How to cook them? And what would stay on the plate, and in the pot while cooking? I decided to try something Italian, which is always popular, and settled on something like Chicken Parmesan, or chicken baked in a tomato sauce with cheese on top, served with pasta. The three vegetarians on board could eat pasta with some sauce reserved for them with grated cheese.
The first thing was to brown 45 chicken breasts, which as I said takes a long time because of the lack of sufficient heat to actually brown. That was easy, as they didn't slide around a lot. However, the huge pot of tomoto sauce was trickier. We had to make in all in one pot because we needed the other one for boiling the pasta water, which takes about an hour to get to simmering. Fortunately, with the lid on, the sauce stayed in the pot (mostly).
One thing about a lot of pitching and rolling is that there is always one wave that comes along every several minutes that is larger than the other ones. So if you put something down and think it is safe from sliding away or falling over, eventually it will slide or topple. Over the course of the afternoon, more or less everything went for a ride. We decided to make dessert (peach crisp, made with canned peaches, since after about 10 days at sea you are completely out of fresh fruit), and we had peach halves all over the floor after they had stayed in their bowl for a good half an hour. The tomato sauce somehow or other managed to stay in the pot for a good 2 hours, but just as I was pouring it over the chicken in the baking trays, a wave came along and there was sauce everywhere. And baking saucy chicken was trickier than bread because the liquid would slosh around in the pans.
Finally, I distributed the boiling (barely) water between two pots and dumped in pasta. We carefully carried the pans of chicken to the main salon (we eat dinner inside when it is dark, and in this part of the time zone in the equatorial winter the sun set at around 6:30, with only about 15 minutes of twilight). When the pasta was ready and dinner was complete, the dinner bell rang and the usual stampede ensued. Anything pasta-like is always a hit, and with dessert that evening, the galley crew were heroes.
By the time we cleaned up all of the dishes, pots, and galley, it was 8:00 p.m. The captain came by and asked the galley crew to find him when we were finished. Shortly after, we met him on the quarterdeck and were led to the officer's mess, which is where the captain eats, occasionally with selected crew members. The captain produced a bottle of wine and gave us a commendation for exemplary service in challenging conditions. We shared the bottle, which was a great way to end that day, and then went below to fall into our bunks, totally exhausted!
2:53:09 AM 
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