Good topic @ChristinaM.
No substantive changes. Part of what my company does is yacht delivery. There aren’t groceries at sea. Whatever we leave the dock with is what we have, and if something turns unexpectedly early we do without that thing. Most of my trips are a week or two. The longest have been six weeks.
A freezer is a glorious thing. You have to manage the space. Label everything. Commercially canned, home canned, and dehydrated goods are a big help. Home canned is my favorite shelf stable - complete control over ingredients and lasts a year. I have a lot canned and labeled (including prices so when I take something on a trip I know what my cost was and my price is). Some foods are really good dehydrated. Dried bananas and dried apples are good snacks. Much cheaper than buying commercial and no chemicals. Dried mushrooms, rehydrated, are much nicer in my opinion, than canned.
With a little planning it doesn’t take much longer to make a lot of something rather than a little. I don’t make one lasagna - I make three. Or five. For things like casseroles I either use disposable foil pans or a layer of plastic wrap between the food and a permanent casserole dish. Once the food is frozen hard I can pop it out of the casserole and either wrap it in foil or vacuum seal it. That way I get my dish back.
Always pay attention to shelf life. If you have a ripe avocado, a head of Boston bibb lettuce, three heads of romaine lettuce, and two heads of cabbage you eat them in that order. That doesn’t mean you don’t eat potatoes, onions, and other root veg until the end - it does mean you eat the fragile stuff first and fastest. Rotting food tossed over the side does no one but fish any good.
Substitutions are a big deal. I read Harold McGee’s On Food & Cooking about every other year. Absolutely my best resource for substitutions.
Many foods that have limited life are made from ingredients that last a very long time. Bread is the most obvious example. Salad dressings.
Living products provide a lot of flexibility. Sprouts. Windowsill herbs. Lettuce in a sunny room.
We did a lot of canning in December and January and cooking to “feed the freezer” in January and February. We raised our restock thresholds. We’re running on my offshore processes here at home. No hoarding and in fact our food waste is down.
I have a trip leaving next week and for a few days I was really uncertain about how I was going to feed everyone. Panic buying on the heels of the Maryland state of emergency seems to have settled out and I’m feeling better. I have 26 person-days and a 14 person-day margin for delays to provision and that’s all looking better now than three days ago. I have another trip on the heels of that one 20 person-days and a margin and I’m feeling okay about that one also. The one after that I have non-food related concerns about. We’ll see.
I have more canning lids and disposable foil coming from Amazon. Their recent email saying deliveries may be delayed is a concern. Kitty litter showed up today so maybe they are just being careful. grin
When you can’t get out (much?), get creative.
