Month: March 2018

A quiet few days

Saturday 17 – Monday 19 March
The weekend brought a bitterly cold wind, with some sunshine. On Saturday the crew took a walk around town, picked up a few items in the very good street market, and had a light lunch at Bagels & Beans. They located the bus/train interchange and Albert Heijn supermarket on the far side of town. With no sign of the harbourmaster they were careful with water.

On Sunday they ventured a brief walk around the harbour, and then tucked up cosy inside to enjoy some light reading and blog-updating. Mate made a warming carrot, leek and cumin soup for lunch and one of the current favourites: Rendang curry for supper.

Monday was still cold and bright. The crew waited around most of the day for the boat near us to come down to sort out the water hose for the nearby hydrant. After two chasing phone calls to the Harbourmaster, he suggested we help ourselves to the hose and DIY – which we did, taking the opportunity to rinse the boat down by way of letting the pipe run through to clean it before delivering into our tanks. It did little to reduce the grit and grime currently embedding into the fender covers from the stone wall against which I’m tied.

Boat-proof tableware

When I was first furnishing L’escale as a comfortable floating home, I searched high and low for attractive, robust ‘crockery’.  It needed to be durable, pleasant to use and easy to store.  I didn’t want some natty nautical design picnicware, and it didn’t need to be dishwasher or microwave safe.

In desperation I resorted to a couple of boxed sets from an online shop for caravan supplies, which in two years of daily use have scratched and stained.  They feel pretty flimsy, too.

In a moment of delicious serendipity in a café in Amsterdam, we were served good cake on a plate that was definitely not ceramic.  Once all the crumbs were ‘cleared’, I turned the plate over to discover ‘zuperzozial’, which I discovered was an arm of Cap Venture BV, a Dutch design and wholesale company with a huge range of interesting, new and funky products.  Included in the list is a collection of tableware made from bamboo and corn, reinforced with melamine resin, in a great range of colours and items: plates, bowls, mugs, trays, sugar and milk sets etc.  It’s very lightweight, and the only possible drawback is that it has an unusual surface texture, which we’re getting used to.

My next challenge was to source the stuff, and after failing spectacularly with the list of stockists on the website, I e-mailed direct and had a quick and very helpful response.  Thus it was, one cold sunny Winter’s day, I had an excuse to visit a suburb of Amsterdam I hadn’t previously explored, where I found Divine & Delicious on Haarlemmermeerstraat, a fabulous cook shop and my idea of Heaven for retail therapy.

L’escale‘s galley now looks much smarter with a matching collection of side plates and breakfast/soup bowls, complementing dinner plates from Lakeland (but that’s a-whole-nother story), and pasta bowls from M&S that match nothing but are well-loved and well used.

 

Gluten-free Soda Bread

A quick, easy recipe for a delicious nutty bread with a great texture, especially good toasted

Makes one 400g loaf

400g in total of gluten-free flours, grains and seeds of your choice: feel free to experiment, use what you have and add seeds eg linseeds (flaxseeds), poppy, sesame, sunflower, pumpkin
My current favourite blends are:

1. 150g buckwheat flour, 100g rice flour, 100g oatmeal, 50g porridge oats (for a texture and flavour like Irish soda bread, but be careful if you are intolerant of oats)
2. 80g buckwheat flour, 120g tapioca flour, 80g potato flour, 40g teff flour, 20g amaranth grain, 60g polenta
3. 100g buckwheat flour, 50g rice flour, 50g tapioca flour, 50g potato flour, 50g polenta, 30g teff flour, 30g sorghum flour, 20g amaranth grain, 20g maize flour

Mix your chosen blend together well in a large bowl, adding 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda and 1tsp salt.

In a separate bowl, beat one egg into 300ml buttermilk, natural yogurt, or milk soured with about 1tsp of lemon juice. Dissolve 3 tsp psyllium husk in a scant 250ml water (this is the essential ingredient that binds everything together; it is widely available in health food stores or online).

Add the liquids to the flour mix and blend everything together thoroughly. Line a large loaf pan with baking paper and tip the dough into the tin. Sprinkle a few more seeds on top if you wish. Bake at 180-200˚C for 30-45 minutes, until the base of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Cool completely then store in the baking paper and foil.

Skye Beans

A quick, satisfying dish for a cold wet passage in Scotland or anywhere

Serves 1

1 teaspoon Marmite dissolved in a little hot water
1 small tin (200g) baked beans
50g strong cheese, cut into small cubes

Mix the dissolved Marmite into the beans in a small pan over a medium heat, stir in the cheese cubes and warm until the cheese begins to melt and the liquid is bubbling gently.

Serve in a bowl with a spoon and some hot buttered toast.

Hoorn

Friday 16 March

This morning Skipper decided on a tactical departure as I was still being blown onto the quay wall, albeit only in the gusts. They walked me from bollard to bollard back towards the corner I met so rudely on the way in, and then sprang off my stern into the wind until my bow came around into the exit channel. It took time, but avoided any further altercation with the hard stuff, and I was soon bouncing along in 18 knots of wind, a good F5, with occasional proper waves pushing me around. Visibility was poor, the coastline only a hazy impression of darker grey shapes, but we were accompanied for almost all the 13 miles to Hoorn by a small black-headed gull hovering determinedly in our wake.

Somewhere over to the left was Edam, which the crew hope to visit by bus while we sit out the next bout of wintry weather, tucked in to an attractive inner harbour amongst traditional craft and elegant gentlemen’s motor boats (the boats, not necessarily their skippers).

The final half mile to the harbour seemed to be marked by a line of foam, which at sea often indicates a line of shallows, but this whole inland sea is only around three metres below my hull, so Mate was a little puzzled…until we drew closer and I scuffled through my first ever patch of brash ice. Once I was well tied up and tidied, my crew settled down to lunch, inside just before it started to sleet, and then snow.

Marken

Thursday 15 March

The morning began in a fairly stiff wind that would have made it difficult to leave the quay wall, so the crew decided to stay here for a second night and explore the village. Marken was established as a small island fishing community.  One January night in 1916, the village was almost destroyed by severe flooding. A causeway was built in the 1950s to link it to the mainland in the Southeast corner of the IJsselmeer.

Small buildings around the harbour, originally fishermen’s family homes, are built of horizontal wooden planks on a brick base. They are painted black with the ‘joins’ picked out in white, a distinctive architectural style even by Holland’s decorative standards.

Behind the harbour is a community of varying ages of homes, a primary school and one small supermarket. The island’s main economy is tourism, and even this early in the season entertains occasional ferry-loads of day trippers from Volendam, across the Markermeer on the mainland. There were also several coaches bringing passengers from Amsterdam to visit the Clog Museum and hunt for souvenirs. One lady cycled by wearing traditional local costume. A small herd of pretty brown goats grazed in a smallholding.

Feeling peckish, my crew finally decided to brave a local delicacy from a street food van, ‘kibbeling’, lightly battered fried fish with a mustardy mayonnaise. This proved delicious, and a relatively cheap lunch snack. They also picked up some lovely fresh tuna to cook for supper.

On returning home, an elderly gentleman hovering around the boat turned out to be the Harbourmaster, who granted us a “special deal” of “only” €32.80 for two nights, one with electricity, but no water, facilities or rubbish disposal available.

The sky remained grey and flat, but the wind gradually dropped during the afternoon, bringing rain after nightfall. Tomorrow we need to move on to a more sheltered spot, ahead of a new lump of sub-zero temperatures and strong winds forecast for the weekend: but at least the sun’s supposed to shine.

Onderweg

Wednesday 14 March 2018

Exactly four months since we arrived in Twellegea Marina, Amsterdam-Noord, my crew slipped the lines just before noon today, and then we stopped again at the bottom of the polder, approximately half a mile away, to top up my diesel tanks. We joined the main channel of the River IJ, heading East, went through the Oranjesluizen locks without incident, and waited for the Schellingwouderbrug to open for us, and another yacht that was heading in towards Amsterdam.

Apart from the air still being cold, it was a perfect Spring day: sunshine with a light breeze. They’re easing us back into cruising gradually, as the mainsail halyard is still attached to the stern end of the boom as a Winter topping lift, and the foresails are still bagged awaiting cleaning and repair. The crew didn’t expect to be able to actually sail to our first destination, Marken in the Gouwzee in the Southwest corner of the IJsselmeer, which is probably the largest paddling pool this side of the Caribbean. For most of the day we had less than three metres of water under our keel, and we’ve joined the dots by following the channel markers all the way here.

We almost completed the day unscathed, but lack of a centreboard coupled with an unexpected crosswind just as we came alongside the town quay in Marken has added another souvenir ding to my aluminium hull. The crew are both rusty and out of practice, but that will soon change.