What to eat when the cupboard is bare

Here we are at Carrie Bow Cay about half way down the islands off Belize and our supplies are running thin, so we thought we'd give you an insight into what we eat when we haven't been to the shops for a fortnight...

In England we're used to living without a fridge and as such are used to going to the shops often. Most days on our way somewhere we'll pop in to buy a little something... Of course we also keep our cupboards on both boats stocked with staples such as rice, beans, pasta and lots of canned tomatoes and so we'd never go hungry.

We're down to our last three onions, a small piece of ginger and a bulb of garlic. All the other veg are gone and fruit wise we have a couple of limes and a grapefruit. To be only left with these things is no surprise; it's what we stock up with most, as they last so well and we use them a lot. We've run out of eggs, not because they wouldn't have lasted this long but because we eat so many of them and didn't buy enough.

We haven't been putting any vegetables in the fridge since we accidentaly froze a whole bag of tomatoes! Though we still used them; not good. We also still have half a chicken frozen from Mexico but haven't been in a hurry to eat it; we actually like the vegetarian concoctions we come up with just as much.

So given our food array available we're having muffins for breakfast. Duncan's speciality and great as we don't need the oven to cook them; not a great idea in this heat. These he makes on the stove top in our cast iron skillet; the only ingredients being flour, yeast and water.  We're getting to the end of our jar of marmite but we still have jams given to us when we left Texas (thanks Terrie and Zsu Zsa!)

 

Last night we had a delicious vegetable satay with our homegrown beansprouts, half a can of water chestnuts and our last pepper. The sauce was made from dried chillis (our fresh ones have dried of their own accord now) onion, ginger and garlic, a pinch of sugar, a dash of fish sauce, soy and tamarind, a handful of peanuts crushed up and a spoon of peanut butter. I'm not of the recipe mindset of cooking so any of these ingredients can be left out, made much more of or other things added, depending on what we have in, or what seems like a good idea at the time; last night some corriander seeds went in too, lightly crushed.

We bought some lovely coconut oil on the last island we were at so we're making popcorn taste more interesting and mixing in shavings of coconut when we make a sweet coating treat. There have been odd scraps of vegetables available for sale at some islands but generally they weren't very fresh, certainly not grown there and very expensive so we've left them.  People here go to shop on the mainland and eat a lot of fresh fish with rice and beans.  We haven't eaten out yet as places we've seen appear to cater for the tourist dollar.  Though we're tourists we don't want to spend that kind of money.

For dinner tonight, unless we catch a fish... we'll have a tomato pasta meal or a chick pea curry.  Duncan has his sights set on a fava bean stew but without any other vegetables I have my doubts...