Cooking at home is way different from cooking on a sailing ship. Here you cook with a recipe and you produce tonnes of food. On our Thor there even is a recipe how to work in the galley.
Ingredients
-Team:
At home most of the time you just need one person to cook for your family, but our Thor family is so big that one person wouldn’t be able to cook for all the others. Every day 4 persons (3 students and 1 crew member) rock the galley.
-Music:
The galley is the only place where you are allowed to listen to loud music. Sometimes a carrot transforms into a microphone and the whole team performs to the song. You can hear very strange kinds of music when you pass the galley door.
-Daily routine:
In the morning you have to get up at 5:45 am. Then you have to prepare breakfast, which has to be ready at 7:20, when the first watch arrives. There is always fruit salad, bread and many different jams. The breakfast is over at 10 o’clock, then you have to clean the dishes of 50 people. At the same time you have to prepare lunch.
At 3 o’clock we have tea time. On ordinary days we eat biscuits or fruits. On birthdays we bake cakes and sing the birthday song.
During the day you must make sure that there is always enough hot water and coffee in enormous cans. Dinner starts at 6 o’clock. We eat hot dishes in the evening, because during the day it’s too hot. Then you have to clean the galley. If the galley looks like a mess it is normal that you have to work till 10 o’clock.
-Availability of ingredients:
At home you can go to the supermarket every time and buy the food you need for your recipe. Here on the Thor in the middle of the Atlantic it isn’t possible to find a supermarket. We just have our dry store, cold store and a freezer room. Because we don’t have the possibility to go to the supermarket we have to store the food. It has to last for 3 weeks. So that we don’t eat everything in the first week there is a plan that tells us how much food we are allowed to cook each day. Moreover we have to make sure that we don’t cook pasta the whole time or eat the frozen bread when there is other bread unfrozen. Although we don’t have a wide range of ingredients available our galley surprises us with a new delicious meal every day.
-Special days:
We don’t eat the same things every day or week. There are so many different dishes our galley can cook.
There are some special days: on Thursdays (Sailor’s Sunday) we have rolls, nutella, eggs and peanut butter for breakfast. The galley service prepares a very delicious meal in the evening. Sundays are like Thursdays, just a little bit better. At least for everyone except for us (the galley service), because the others can enjoy their free time.
-Heavy seas:
You have to be very careful with glasses and plates. If you don’t put them on an ‚anti-slip-blanket‘, which prevents them from falling down, they might break into pieces by slipping from the table.
These are the ingredients for cooking on the Thor Heyerdahl, you have to throw them all together in a pot, mix it and stir hard. Then you probably have to wait for four weeks until the whole thing has crossed the Atlantic and has arrived in the new world-
There it’s finished and ready to eat.