We are in the early stages of planning a BVI bareboat charter. Im a planner. For ease of cooking and eating dinner ashore, what types of meals, lunches, breakfast do you guys have? What sorts of things do you bring down in a checked bag/ice chest?

Hey ScurvyD -
I expect you'll get some input from the larger crowd here shortly ... but I'd offer my .02. I do most of the cooking and provisioning for our crew.

We do our own shopping and generally go with the 'Easy on the Cook' model with half of our dinners ashore. Usually end up having 2-3 lunches ashore as well.

I tend to favor easy breakfasts - yogurt/granola, cereal, etc. over bacon&eggs. Makes the dishes easier to get done when you're about to get underway for the day.

I also have found we tend to snack more throughout the day than having a fixed meal. We always do sundowners with something to snack on. Our last dinner on the boat is always eating up all the leftovers.

We've used Riteway and their delivery service and have had good experiences doing it that way.
HTH
cw

Breakfast - If you have kids, cereal is easy, get the long lasting milk. We often do breakfast sandwiches; eggs, bacon, cheese on an English Muffin. You can toast the muffins in the oven under the broiler. Some mornings we just have muffins, yogurt and fruit. Trail mix is always a good staple. A couple times we will make sausage and pancakes.

Lunch - Wraps work really well. Bread doesn't last long before it molds. We often have leftovers from dinner that go in the wraps. Sometimes we just have cut up cheese, salami sticks and crackers. I also cook up taco meat at home and take along. Great for nachos or tacos for lunch.

Dinner - We have 11 nights on the boat, we plan 5 on board meals. The rest we eat on shore. Here is menu (most of the time)
Filet mignons, rice and salad
Marinated chicken breast, red skin potatoes and green beans (leftover chicken makes great wraps and chicken salad)
Marinated pork tenderloin, stove top stuffing and a veggie - (leftovers are used for BBQ pork sandwiches)
Cheeseburgers and pasta salad
Lasagna or spaghetti (in case it is raining and we can't grill), salad and garlic bread (we make the spaghetti sauce or the lasagna at home and bring it with us)

We talk a cooler of meat with us. We pre-cook all of the sausage, bacon and taco meat. I prep all of the other meat so it is ready to through on the grill. Marinated and trimmed, makes dinner prep very easy.

We are always land based but I am the planner/shopper and cook of the family and I am used to cooking in a kitchen tinier than the size of one found on the small sailboat.

When we take a cooler, all my proteins serve double duty, I cook twice as much so one cooking session = two meals.

Adding to the above chicken mention, grilled chicken for dinner and the leftovers served cold for lunch the next day - chicken salad, added to a pasta salad, sliced/diced for sandwiches or warmed as taco or burrito fillings. I like the large, split bone-in breasts for vacation cooking.

For beef, I like cuts like a tenderloin, flank or skirt steak that slices well and is as good cold the next day as an addition to a salad, on its own with a creamy Dijon/horseradish sauce. Again, makes a good taco/burrito filling.

As far as starches go - rices, especially wild brown and black rice, is very tasty at room temp (we eat on the beach). If we make a pasta at night, the left overs get tossed with leftover veggies for a pasta salad.

Creole style rice mixes like Zataran's are a great way to use up leftover sausage, shrimp, chicken and veggies.

I plan the meals at home. All meats are vac-packed and frozen solid. I portion out whatever spices I need into small bags and tape the spices and the recipe to the top of the meat. I have two master lists - one for the provisioning company and one for on-island purchases.

I do all this for time savings. If I have room for a couple of boxes of wild rice, nuts, etc I will take that along. If not, I add the dry items to the provisioning list.

Precooking bacon, sausage, ground beef, as mentioned above, is a huge time saver and keeps the kitchen cool. My home cottage kitchen has no A/C, no window and no exhaust fan so I learned long ago how to cook the easy way in the summer!

We usually get 1/2 our dinners for the week and a full set of breakfasts and lunches.
We eat out enough to be able to use a lunch or two for dinner and if we run outa something there's plenty of places to find food basics.
We normally grill on the back-rail of the boat to avoid heating the inside of the boat up ... not as big an issue as it used to be, that is, if your boat has Gen/AC.

<img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/Clapping.gif" alt="" />Great info, thanks to all of you. I cant wait to go.