When you’re sailing, provisioning is always an adventure.
In Greece, it’s a high intensity activity since most labels are beyond even the comprehension of Google Translate. It’s a gamble every time you buy food that whatever you put in your cart is actually what you thought it was supposed to be.
I’ve bought sour cream that was yogurt, butter that was cheese, and milk that was, well, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what it was.
The other quandary is that ingredients for something you want to make aren’t usually all found in one store, or even on one island. This was always a classic conundrum provisioning in the Caribbean. You often would find avocados on one island but not any chips for another island or two.
But we’re getting pretty seasoned at grocery store gambling. We call it “recipe roulette.”
Recently, which is to say, two islands ago, we found what we thought was HOT SAUCE. We were at a butcher shop and the butcher didn’t speak any english so we couldn’t confirm our spicy suspicions. So we took a chance, since we hadn’t seen any hot sauce in months, and bought it.
A few islands later, the taco gods shined down on us and, lo and behold, we found the ingredients to make tacos. This is an exciting discovery for an American.
So we made tacos and then sat down to eat them and said a quick prayer that, if indeed the hot sauce wasn’t actually hot sauce, we requested a bit of heavenly intervention–like a water into wine kinda deal, only more like shrimp sauce or catsup into spicy Mexican hot sauce.
We cracked the seal on that bottle and sure enough, we had ourselves a delicious taco night with hot sauce!
Winner, Winner, Taco Dinner!
