Finally after all that marmalading, baking and tuiling, Christmas is HERE!
The presents are unwrapped, the stockings are emptied, the liquor miniatures therein have been imbibed, the kids are drunk, and the goose is cooking.

Flora joined us again this year thus making this an unbreakable Christmas tradition (too late now Flora - you can never escape us) and bringing her usual cheesy board, plus some groovy bloody mary vodkas, novelty Christmas recipe ideas, and a surprise collection of leftovers from her school's Christmas party. Kurt and the kids found the oysters particularly challenging. But I enjoyed them - thanks Flora!

Cheeses by Flora:

• Morbier, famously Comté-like cheese with an ash layer in the middle
• Rachel - a goats cheese from Somerset. Apparently named after a Rachel who was sweet, curvy and slightly nutty.
    Well Rachel, two out of three ain't bad, right??
• Moliterno - a raw sheep's milk Pecorino from Sardinia, infused with black truffle after aging
• Murcia al vino (Murcian wine cheese) - a raw goats milk cheese from Murcia in Spain; washed in red wine during maturation
• Apres Soleil - an extremely rich and pleasant hard cows milk cheese matured in Swiss caves where they are regularly bathed in sunlight.

As usual I contributed unnecessary extra cheeses of my own to ensure at least some of them would begin mouldering before we could finally finish them off well into January. They sort of fell into my bag while I was shopping for goats cheese at Bradford's only, but quite excellent, delicatessen; Roswithas. Yep, Bradford is an actual cultural desert.

Cheeses by Karl:

• Smelly Ha'peth - a soft blue cow's milk cheese from The Saddleworth Cheese Company in Lancashire, although tarred on its own website with the appelation artisan it's actually not a bad cheese. From a Coronation Street actor anyway.
• Old Amsterdam - a Dutch (as far as I can tell) gouda (though not actually made in Gouda) matured for two years, packed with naturally developed salt crystals and a personal favourite of mine.
• and of course, a gooey slab of Gorgonzola

Other than some tension concerning just how much cleaning the fridge handles really require in the middle of dessert, the dinner went swimmingly, despite:
Stuff we (re-)learned this year:

• We made our usual mistake of trying to time the goose to be cooked at serving time.
  We should have allowed an hour resting time (such a large goose will still retain plenty of heat wrapped in foil), meaning we could organise the veg and roasties in the final hour to be perfectly cooked, as opposed to somewhat crispy in our case.
  Since our 6kg goose took slightly over 5 hours at Gas Mark 3 we should have started it 6 hours before planning to serve.
• No-one likes soggy tuiles starters.
• Good things to do with the inevitable leftover Christmas pud:
  • Fry with savouries like bacon, black pudding or mushrooms
  • Fry and combine with some of that excess Christmas cheese (Smelly Ha'peth is nice)

Happy Goose guzzling y'all.

Finally safely harboured in Fleetwood marina near Blackpool for the winter. Don't ask me about Liverpool. Just don't.

Blackpool in mid (or early) winter is a bleak place, though probably no less tacky than it would be in summer.
The famous tower still dominates the landscape and would probably be great to visit if it wasn't so freakishly expensive, and their shoreline tram system is very efficient for getting in and out, particularly since it runs right out to the marina. Plus they run fabulous old heritage trams along the central section which are great entertainment.
At this time of year you can also still find remnants of the celebrated annual Blackpool illuminations. That you just missed. Anything related to Doctor Who clearly being the best.

It's obvious that the seafront has been heavily invested in recent times and is littered with uplifting sculptures and quirky landscaping though I can't help wondering if that money could not have been better spent on infrastructure or the local architecture which is mostly still quite brutalist and feels very run-down (Coral Island excepted). Mind you, I did discover there the best Advent calendar in the world from Thorntons - with a delicious individual continental truffle for each day of Advent. So it's not all doom and gloom.
It's the true meaning of Christmas folks - yumsk!
Take note Thorntons - any sponsorship is gratefully received.

I spent a few days onboard practicing making Christmas tuiles, and using up more of my boat's barley supplies (see below), but then decamped to my brother's place in Bradford for the rest of the Christmas period. Handy for a helping hand with making up our Christmas red onion marmalade from the kiddies and getting all the Christmas baking done in a real oven. Sheer luxury.



I also felt the need to get a hair cut. First one of the year! Brrrrrr.

Littlehampton is a rather nice West Sussex seaside town and about the only safe haven between Brighton and Chichester Harbour (as the yacht sails).
The pontoons there sit in the tidal Arun river, though, which mostly disappears at low tide and only offers navigable depth for a keel boat for a short time. So you need to plan your passages quite carefully. Particularly if you're departing westwards, hoping to make Portsmouth or Gosport within the day and having to round the notoriously awkward Selsey Bill with its narrow channels and dangerous rocks.
Not surprisingly it was precisely here that my auto-helm decided to pack up, providing me the luxury of rediscovering how damned difficult single-handedly tacking and gybing a full-sized yacht is without one, not to mention the difficulty of stowing sails and setting lines and fenders coming into Gosport marina without the autohelm to take charge of the boat while I worked (sorry HMS Queen Elizabeth).
Absolutely bloody typically the Solent there is the busiest sea area I've yet sailed in. Battleships, cargo ships, yachts (many racing), speedboats, ferries, ocean liners, aircraft carriers, patrol boats absolutely everything absolutely everywhere.
Funnily enough the only vessel which tried to run me down was another sodding yacht who seemed determined to pass as close to me as possible, requiring me to stay out of his way (being windward boat, though since I wasn't racing, the colregs overtaking rule takes precedence) and becoming shouty when I didn't, because I'd reduced sail so much to make it easier to non-auto-helm the boat that when the wind eased at that very moment I lost all steering.
At least he had the good grace to apologise as he raced off into the distance.

Arun District Council commissioned a series of six recipe-engraved waymarkers along Littlehampton's River Walk to reflect the historical use of the local 18th century Oyster Pond (now a boating lake) used to store oysters brought ashore as the trade grew. I include their recipes for your entertainment, maybe I'll try one or two of the less disgusting ones at some future date?
Oddly for a town at the mouth of the river Arun none of the recipes are for the traditional local dish of Arundel Mullet - served with a sauce of anchovies, lemon, red wine, onion, herbs and nutmeg.

I took no photos of Littlehampton itself (well, other than the recipe stones), so instead enjoy these views taken approaching the needles on the far side of the Isle of Wight a week later. Having repaired the auto-helm at Gosport courtesy of the nearby Raymarine dealer.

True story - it turns out to be possible to sail (well, drift) a small keel boat between the needles at the very top of a spring tide. Stupid but possible. It certainly raised eyebrows on the little fishing skiff that was casting lines in the gap. His advice, after I asked him what depth he had, was that I would be mad to attempt the passage, and expressed curiosity as to whether I couldn't bloody well see the horrible sharp rocks under his hull (actually I couldn't). So I ultra-cautiously bobbed through the empty socket left when the (actually) needle-shaped pillar Lot's Wife collapsed in a 1764 storm.

Around full flood the tide really surges through the needles, and you would be foolish indeed to venture too close, but if you pick your moment around high water on a nice day you can casually float between the surviving chalk stacks without risking too violent an impaling. At the shallowest point I had a full half a meter under the keel, though I'm not sure how close pointy bits might have approached my flanks.

Or at least, Brighton Blue cheese rocks.
Brighton not so much.

Just along the coast from my birthplace, on which day the sea froze for the first time in living memory as my Mum never tired of pointing out every time I denied being the anti-Christ, Brighton is another sad reminder of Great Britain's Victorian heyday. Run-down and decrepit, you can still find small signs of it's former grandeur:
The skeletal sea stump remains of the old West Pier, the rusting rails of Volk's electric beach railway, a closed and faded Peter Pan playground, and the endless, endless cast iron and massively cemented seafront parade.
Like an abandoned palace they feel simultaneously magnificent and empty and lonely.

Still, the chavtastic town centre has one irrefutable claim to faim - Real California Burritos & Tacos. Finally!

Brighton marina (a long walk from the town centre) is massive, expensive, but incredibly welcome after the exhausting 60 mile crossing from St Valery-en-Caux. It's also well-catered with a chandlery and an up-market shopping mall, boasting an ersatz delicatessan selling unlikely cured meats and Brighton's Blue cheese.
I made good use of the latter in a few onboard pasta dishes.
And then cooked a few non-blue-cheese pasta dishes just to cleanse my palate.
Enjoy!

Why American bluebirds should be flying over the cliffs of either Dover or Dieppe is anyone's guess - maybe they escaped from a zoo? Anyhoo, they flew us to victory in a World War so who am I to judge?

You can see the coast of France from the shithole that is Dover (it's only about 18 miles away), so I thought I should visit. Well, it would have been rude not to :)

I didn't fancy Calais much, and I wanted to work my way westwards anyway, so I aimed my boat at Boulogne and set sail in a brisk beam breeze.
It wasn't so much that I'd underestimated the Channel tide (which runs at a surprising brisk pace in the middle - reaching over 3 knots at springs) as that I just assumed I would be better able to make up for lost ground when I got closer to France and escaped the strongest tide. So instead of holding my heading for Boulogne I allowed my course to drift eastwards - bearing away for the speed advantage, and ending up on the wrong side of Cap Gris Nez (The Grey Nose) headland with a long beat between me and Boulogne.
My cunning plan of using the bay behind Gris Nez to get out of the adverse tide was defeated by the unexpected (to me) shallowness of the bay, meaning I just had to grit my teeth and sail into the wind for hours, inching my way along the (rather dull) coastline making about half a knot. I finally, and extraordinarily gratefully, arrived at Boulogne's absolutely massive outer harbour in the dark, against a strong wind and heavy sea.
Next time I'll make sure to hold the course I need from the get-go and avoid sacrificing ground for speed.

Funny story, I had always believed the phrase éminence gris meant eminent pig, and so assumed the headland was called (which I thought appropriate)The Pig's Nose.
Until I looked it up.
And then figured out that the former phrase must actually refer to grey men. Live and learn.

The cliffs along the Normandy shoreline around Dieppe (known optimistically as the Alabaster coast) quite closely resemble the more famous cliffs of Dover. Except dirtier-looking. But about as interesting. Fortunately the actual harbour towns are really lovely, authentically historic in a way that British coastal towns are not, having held on fiercely not only to their architecture (they are absolutely littered with chateaux, and nary a cement tower block in sight) but to their traditional markets and small shops.

Between the chateau of Boulogne and the chateau of Dieppe you find the first St Valery, reached by sailing across a very long and tortuous stretch of the Somme, (I doubt we ever fought over it since it spends most of its time underwater. On the other hand - I have seen Blackadder...) and called, not surprisingly, St Valery sur Somme.
The navigable channel is less than obvious and I was relieved to have a yacht to follow in. Though I was less happy when he ran aground in front of me and I had to quickly plan my own course. Turned out he was English anyway, and had no more idea than I did. Or apparently less.

The other side of the chateau of Dieppe (when you can finally escape the first) lies the second Saint Valery - this one en Caux. Quite an old-fashioned harbour town with a thriving local fishing industry (and some fine cheese shops selling fine truffled cheese) where you can find heaps of gleaming whelks for those with more adventurous culinary taste.


For myself, next week I shall be mostly eating this pot of Mae Ploy's Thai green curry paste...

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Things I've learned whilst living on a boat:

1. There may be a reason your toilet smells awful.
2. The reason your toilet may smell.
3. You will always discover an item of dirty laundry, immediately you finish doing the laundry.
4. Boats do not heal themselves. Except for that compass bubble. That healed itself.

Some of these things may not be exclusive to life aboard ship.

The actual reason my toilet smells awful is an unfortunate side-effect of adding a small device to the inlet pipe which, ironically, is supposed to make the toilet smell better.
It's a pot of a hard disinfectant material which dissolves over time into the inlet water colouring and odourising the inlet water in imitation of those blue tablets you get for real toilets.
Unfortunately, once the disinfectant block has completely dissolved, the container makes an ideal trap for sea-going algae, slime and scum to grow and fester.
Somewhat defeating the purpose.

I have no explanation for the disappearance of my compass bubble.

My uni friends Chris and Cathy came by for dinner.
I was moored in Limehouse marina on the Isle of Dogs at the time - near Canary Wharf. A surprisingly salubrious area considering its proximity to Tower Hamlets, and walking distance from the new Billingsgate Fish Market which moved there from the City of London in 1982 - handy for me! Not so handy is the fact that you have to shop there between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. and though they do sell to the public, they're not interested in cutting anything up. So you can buy a whole lobster, a whole crab, a whole salmon, a half-dozen scallops in their shell or anything by the ton, but if you want a few monkfish steaks you have to shop elsewhere; say the Canary Wharf branch of Waitrose, just around the corner.

My ex-skipper John kindly donated me a boat barbecue before I left Edinburgh - one of those which clamps onto your boat's stern rails. I wasn't completely convinced that it wouldn't just swivel round and dump the entire contents of the barbecue into the sea. Or worse, onto the hull and set fire to it. But it tested out pretty well with a whole (un-burning) bag of charcoal sitting on the grill so considering the extremely favourable weather, and having the approval of the marina, I decided that this was the time to crank it up. And it worked like a charm!

I'd originally been considering en-papillotte dishes - I was thinking of something like salt cod or monkfish with chorizo on a bed of carrots, flavoured with anise for Chris - the carnivore. Plus a bag with salmon, asparagus, and vodka flavoured with liquorice or perhaps vanilla, along these lines, for Cathy - the pesky tarian. I thought I could do these on the barbecue easily enough, but when I discovered that Billingsgate didn't sell fish by the piece I decided to mainly go with a whole-fish theme.
I also abandoned my plans for panna cotta dessert - partly because it started to feel like overkill and partly 'cos I couldn't be bothered figuring out how to substitute agar agar for the gelatine to suit someone strangely averse to boiled cows' hooves.

Given how hot it's been recently, and how hot it was forecast to be on Saturday, I thought it might be pleasant to have a couple of cold dishes too - which gave me the perfect opportunity to try out a dish I've been wanting to take a bash at ever since eating it at Edinburgh's Castle Terrace restaurant: a salmon tartar with puffed rice and wasabi ice cream.
Popping the rice turned out not to be such a problem, having read up on how to do it. Basically you cook some rice as normal (doesn't seem important what kind - I used Thai jasmine), then dry it (I baked it in the oven), then you deep-fry it to make it pop. Apparently you can puff wholegrain rice without pre-boiling since it explodes out of the husk, but I didn't try that.
That worked pretty well, though because the oil temperature has to be very high, and the rice scooped out almost instantly, you can only really fry very small batches. Fortunately this dish doesn't require very much puffed rice so that's not such an issue, and you can just pick out the grains which burn or don't pop.
The real problem for me was how to make ice cream on a boat with only a fridge!??
Well, since the temperature control knob in my fridge has seized up at arctic the element freezes solid, which means I can lay a small freezer bag of ice cream mixture on top of it, squidging the bag around occasionally to break up the ice crystals as it sets. Fortunately this dish doesn't need much ice cream either.
I also threw in a new (to me) Nigel Slater recipe for chilled crab soup.

Worried that my guests might not have enough to eat Ha Ha!, or at least that they might like something to soak up all the garlic juices, I had a Pyrex bowl of seasoned couscous standing by to which I'd added grated lemon peel and chopped parsley. In the end no one seemed desperate for more food and I didn't get around to making it. It's a handy thing to have ready though - all you need to do is add water!

Beforehand I put two whole heads of garlic in the oven to bake for about 40 minutes in a moderate oven (160°C/Gas Mark 3) until they softened, then squidged out the cloves into a bowl. I mixed half the roast garlic with butter, chopped parsley and salt & pepper then warmed it in a small saucepan for brushing over the fish on the barbecue you could add lemon zest and chilli flakes too if you liked. The other garlic head I kept for filling aubergines.
I didn't want to bake the (smallish) aubergines from scratch on the barbecue as I figured it would take too long and my barbecue is too small to dedicate so much space for so long. So I pre-cooked them in the microwave boo! hiss! for 2-3 minutes until they softened. I also threw them in the oven with the steak to warm back up again probably not necessary before cutting a slice out of the top of each, stuffing with garlic and crumbled feta cheese, and finishing them off on the barbecue.

The steak I also partly pre-cooked in the oven since it was so large I was afraid to burn the outside before warming it through on the barbecue, and didn't want to cut it down first.

I made up three barbecue flavourings, the first I kept warm in a small saucepan and the latter two I poured into plastic squeezy bottles for ease of delivery:

• roast garlic and parsley butter (as above)
• soy sauce steak dressing
• lemon and Ricard salad and fish dressing

And here's the result...

There aren't that many places on the Wash that a yacht with a keel (or a mast) can sail into. Like its namesake across the Atlantic, Boston used to be a great fishing and trading port, but it no longer offers harbour for boats that can't drop their masts. Fosdyke and Wisbech are a long way inland, and I'm not even sure they're accessible for yachts. Which pretty much leaves King's Lynn, which offers a rather nice pontoon in the heavily tidal river Ooze Ouse in a spot with just enough water to keep my boat afloat at low water. The meandering passage from the wash across shallow mud flats into the river is just short enough make it in over a high tide. So I decided to pay a visit.

King's Lynn is also close enough to Cambridge to visit with my old friend Professor Nick. Bonus.
Nick invited me back to his place in Cambridge to spend the night and catch up with his lovely wife Belgium and his precocious children, though he didn't go so far as to offer me his washing machine to do all my smelly laundry.
Still, we had a gay old time revisiting our old university haunts, drinking 'til it hurt, and marvelling at the hordes of hipster douche-bags infesting the bars with lumberjack flannel and jihadi beards.

Back in King's Lynn, Nick and I went for lunch and discovered a completely a completely brilliant little restaurant - Richard and Lucy Golding's Market Bistro, which now seems, sadly, to have closed :( so good I had to revisit later to eat the rest of the menu.
It's a small place, and some of their tables are a little cramped, but they more than make up for it with their locally sourced, brilliantly inventive and incredibly thorough food. Their attention to detail is astonishing - I couldn't understand why the black pudding served with their rare breed pork collar course was so succulent , until they explained that they had taken a local black pudding, pureéd it, calcified it, reverse spherified it, then floured and deep-fried it to serve.
And this is just one of the four side dishes that come with the meat, bear in mind.
Now that's dedication!

Richard's chefery inspired me to attempt to reproduce both his luxurious spring cabbage with truffled cheese (an optional side dish) and his throwaway amuse bouche - goats cheese and onion marmalade tuile. With mixed success :)
So delicious.

Unfortunately next week I will be mostly eating pesto...

A random collection of food I cooked up on the boat, from savoury bread puddings to treacle puddings.
And some recipes that aren't puddings.
When I moved aboard I emptied the contents of my kitchen into the boat and now I should be doing all I can to use it all up. Trouble is, whenever I buy fresh food I end up using that first. And bacon sandwiches are sooooo delicious. I'm going to have to resist and force myself to improvise with the stores I have aboard, though I usually do manage to squeeze some dried beans or at least flour into every meal.
As you can see below, I don't always succeed but it does make for a fragrant vessel :)

Hope it was a good one!

This year Flora joined my brother, his kids and me for our traditional Christmas celebrations, bringing with her a very nice bottle of Pouillon's demi-sec champagne, a jar of ersatz caviar, the largest vacuum pack of smoked salmon I've ever seen, and Christmas presents galore.
She also forced us, rather uncharacteristically, out of the house to see Bradford's Christmas panto (Peter Pan at the Alhambra for your information). Oh Yes She Did!
Flora has ways of making you jolly :)

We enjoyed all the usual Christmas day fayre - the goose, the PERFECT stuffing, the sprouts, the bread sauce, the roasties and the gravy. Oh the gravy.
Turns out that 6 hours of gravy-making (first kill your chicken...) can really make a yacht moist. I hope she's dried out by the time I get back to her in the new year.

For the starter this year I thought I'd have a go at some smoked salmon panna cottas, but wasn't too enamoured of the result (though I might revisit them when I have more time and inclination - I'm quite keen on the idea of savoury panna cottas) so I went for a starter made from an earlier recipe for Smoked Salmon with Horseradish Mousse rolls. This time though I pressed the horseradish flavoured cream through a sieve to remove the lumps, and added a little vodka too - well hell, it IS Christmas.
We sliced the rolls into rounds and served them with spring onions and mixed salad leaves on miniature blinis, and scattered Flora's caviar well, Onuga, on top. They went down very well, though that might have had something to do with how hungry we were waiting for the bread sauce!

What we (re-)learned this year:

• Your bread sauce might take up to 2 hours at the bottom of the goose oven, especially if you've made a double quantity, and didn't pre-heat the milk.
• Our stuffed 14lb goose took 5 hours at Gas Mark 3 in Kurt's oven (which I think runs a little hot) to be perfectly cooked well, perfectly cooked for Kurt - slightly overdone for my taste. In fact, I had to turn the oven down a little and cover the goose in foil due to waiting for the bread sauce.
• You can overdo the apple in the Perfect Christmas stuffing recipe - one apple (as written) is just right
• Christmas Gravy is even better if you first poach your chicken for 45 minutes in white wine and water flavoured with herbs, peppercorns, allspice, and orange zest and then use the carcass and poaching liquid as the basis for the stock. (And the rest of the chicken for a tasty Thai soup.)
• You can use your leftover gravy as stock for your pilaf. In fact, you probably should.
• It's easy to curdle brandy butter as you blend it, though it still tastes fine. Unfortunately, despite the fact he requested it, your brother won't eat it anyway.
• Starting the twelve days of Christmas mornings with a Bloody Mary definitely helps to make your brother's kids more bearable :)

Christmas is rounded off by our traditional, if slightly melancholy, pilaf, into which goes everything we have left.

Had a lovely chicken dinner, lovely.
Though some of that might have been down to the bottle and a half of wine I'd worked through in celebration of leaving wavy Port Edgar and making it the 50 miles to Eyemouth. Hurrah!

I followed Simon Hopkinson's instructions in Roast Chicken and Other Stories except that I felt the chicken wanted to keep going at 230°C for the whole time, or at least as close as I could get my boat oven to it, so I didn't reduce the temperature. Well not deliberately anyway.

My roast potatoes (Charlottes, boiled until soft, halved, seasoned, thrown into an oven tin of hot goose fat) were (almost) ready too early, so I scooped them out with a slotted spoon, wrapped them in kitchen paper until the chicken was cooked, then returned them to the hot roasting tin to finish off.
And they came out perfectly. Who says you can't hold your roasties?!

I thought I already had a bunch of thyme for the chicken, but when I unwrapped it they'd gone mouldy - the trials of living on a boat. So I used some of the coriander dressing (with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil) I'd made up and stashed in the fridge to stop the coriander going the same way. A couple of tablespoons ladled into the chicken along with the crushed garlic cloves and lemon halves.
Oh, and a quartered chunk of ginger that need using up too.
Here's how Simon makes his chicken.

I made creamed leeks to go with and added a sprinkling of epazote to them. Either the wine was really effective, or the leeks were really good. Here's what I did:
Fry a good heaped tablespoon of plain flour in a generous amount of butter. Add fat rings of 2 well-washed, drained, leeks. Fry until softened. Add salt, a generous grind of white pepper, half a teaspoon of epazote. Stir in milk until you get a thick sauce.

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Last weekend I cooked dinner for Chic and Nicky - not least in return for the lovely roast pork (and whisky salad) they'd pity-fed me previously.
My second boat dinner was somewhat more chaotic than the first, since I hadn't managed to get everything quite so well organised in advance, what with having to sail down to Granton during the day to pick up a new gas bottle. This Camping Gaz is a bit niche, it seems.

So there was a good deal more chopping and prepping in front of the guests, but it mostly went off pretty well. Though I thought my coriander Jasmine rice was terrible. Chic kindly claimed that all the rice he'd had in Thailand was just the same, but I think it would have helped if I'd rinsed the rice more thoroughly (or at all) before cooking, and avoided over-cooking it slightly so it turned to glue.

Speaking of over-cooking, my baked apples completely collapsed. They tasted just fine (I stuffed them with raisins and chopped dates and drizzled them with Calvados), but I should obviously have kept more of an eye on them :)