When I prepare for a longer sail, I want to have canned/packed food for 3 month on board for the number of crew members.

For this, I prepared, update, and improve my provisions list for canned/packed food. Thus, I not only know what is on board and where, but i also know what has been consumed during a certain period certain number of people.

Cultural background, likes, don’t likes, allergies, etc also have an influence. One sailing companion could not eat fish, shells, etc for health reasons. My current sailing companion, my Japanese sailing friend Shigeo, loves/needs food coming out of the sea. In contrast to the European cuisine, the Japanese cuisine doesn’t know fruits to be part of a meal, but only in small volumes as desserts.

For canned fish the influence is not so much. We just bought a bunch of cans with tuna. I also still some canned mackerel on board.

Immediately prior to departure, the right amount of fruits and vegetables needs to be purchased and daily watched for what needs to be eaten next.

Yesterday, we saw that 2 mangos and the first bananas need to be eaten. Shigeo, the chef on board, comes from the Japanese cuisine, and I love Japanese cuisine. Thus we have perfect match. But he doesn’t know how to prepare a meal with fruits as a main part. So I had to take over for last night’s dinner and made pancakes. European pancakes without baking powder etc. Shigeo, always interested in new unknown recipes watched carefully how I made pancakes. While I baked the big chunk of pancakes, he chopped bananas and mangos.

Knowing him, I filled the last two pancakes with mozzarella cheese, folded them and put them back into the frying pan with only the smallest heat possible and closed it with a lid to let the cheese melt. A cheese pancake was the start. Next round was banana-peanut butter pancake, which was followed by a mango filled pancake. It was not bad.

Today, Shigeo made a light lunch and guess what he made. He took the last 2 pancake left over from last night’s dinner, filled them with cheese and served it with the today’s variation of cabbage salad.

During our lunch he asked can these pancakes also eaten with this or that. It became the main topic. Sometimes I said straight “no”. Sometimes I said “yes” but thinking a bit longer I said that I think the real Japanese version is the better one.

Being now more than 40 years in Japan, I feel that European-Japanese fusion food is not the best. However, Japanese-Korean fusion food, which I discovered on one of my many business trips to Korea, is excellent.

As Japan has the highest number of people above 100 years, the Japanese cuisine can be regarded as extremely healthy.

Topics talked about while sailing in the Southern Pacific between Bora-Bora and Penrhyn.