Digging into the guest berths

Since winter really hasn't started yet, we put on our old clothes and headed for the boat. Our aim was to clean up the wood trim in what we call the guest berth area and see how difficult this thing will be to take apart.

Once the cushions were removed, we were left with two platforms made of what looks like 5/8" plywood. Those are covered in brown paint and aren't in bad shape at all. We scrubbed the grunge off of the wood trim and then tried to remove the screws holding the base of the lower berth in place. One last screw out of eight will require a little more persuasion but we'll get it.

Our interest in picking up that long piece of plywood is to see if we can add a pull-out step. We're still working on that design.

While we were there, we measured the size of one of our two galley sinks. We'd like to make an insert for one of them that would increase our counter space. We have an extra, fairly nice, butcher 
block style top from a Princess marine stove. Cutting and fitting it into the top of one of the sinks will take careful measurement. Right now, we know it's 10" X 14". Getting the corners right will be the challenge.

Good things to eat

We're not "foodies" by any means, but we do enjoy cooking together and love the things suggested by The New York Times Cooking website. Thinking that it wouldn't be above our pay grade, this week we tried Rigatoni With White Bolognese, shown here. Our review? Delicious! Cooking time for us was somewhat longer than we expected and we would have been happy with something a little smaller than rigatoni, but it was good!

If you think this doesn't have anything to do with boating, think again. We met Sam Sifton, the guy who edits the The New York Times Cooking, many years ago in Greenport, Long Island where we were docked. He invited us and a lot of other people to his backyard pig roast. It was, well, a lot of hungry people and one pig. Tasted good to us and we had fun! We've followed Sam's career at The Times ever since.

Frances was on a roll in the kitchen and that's always a good thing. On Saturday night, she whipped up one of our favorites, Chicken Piccata. It's always fun to watch her reduce a huge pile of spinach and a lot of other things to wonderful sauce in which the chicken is cooked.

We could say that Frances cooks like this only during the dreary winter months but actually, she also turns out dishes like this on our boat during the summer.