179: BEST TWO PROVISION STORES in Marsh Harbor & TWO easy recipes

On September 1st, 2019, the eye of Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the Abaco Islands with maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, making it the strongest hurricane on record to affect the Bahamas. 70 people died and hundreds were declared missing. The islands were devastated. Almost 50 percent of the homes suffered severe damage or were completely destroyed. 90 percent of the infrastructure of Marsh Harbor was damaged. After two years, the rebuilding continues and the local spirit is strong. Cruisers and tourists have started to return, bringing much-needed revenue to the local businesses. Salvage companies have removed most of the sunken boats and vehicles from Marsh Harbor and the marinas are in the process of rebuilding their docks and offices. We also found provisioning to be plentiful. Our favorite grocery stores were Maxwell's and Abaco Groceries. Well we found this Abaco Grocery here. It's a few miles north just outside the airport and we're going to go in and check out what they got in here. Thank you so much. Good morning. How are you? We liked Abaco Groceries because it was much cheaper than Maxwell's, carried a lot of staples, many of which were from Costco, and you could buy in bulk. The downside was we didn't know how long products had been sitting on the shelves, the produce was not as fresh, there were fewer total products, and the distance back to the harbor definitely required a car. Oh, sweet potato fries, the waffle cut ones. Babe, salmon steaks over here, tuna steaks, tilapia steaks. Prices here are so much cheaper than Maxwell's. It is worth a cab ride out here. This must be really the local shop because this is incredible in comparison. It's almost, I would say, maybe half price. In some cases, less than half price in comparison to Maxwell's. So this is Maxwell's. It's only about a, I don't know, 10 minute walk from the dinghy dock and you'll get to see all that they have stocked inside, but they do a really good job with product. Wow, they're getting ready for Thanksgiving. So in the Bahamas, they do require masks indoors, but they provide all of the necessary. This is a great place. Necessary Purell to be able to. So excited. Turn away. Literally looks like an American grocery store, but check this out. A small chicken is $14.50. That's like double what it is in the States. $12.60 for half a pint of raspberries. $10 for strawberries. Almost two pounds of grapes is $10. Maxwell's was within walking distance of the dinghy dock. It included a hardware store, had a huge variety of products, and their vegetables were fresh and long lasting. The downside was the prices were high, but certainly commiserate with the rest of the Bahamas. And the fruit seemed to be a lot more fragile, sometimes rotten on the shelf. They're always putting stuff out. They've got the best muzak here. Yes, they do. Shelves are stocked. Pretty amazing. So if you are provisioning, we would suggest you start at Abaco Groceries for all of your bulk needs and staples, and then get the rest of your items at Maxwell's. Sweetie, we're getting things done today. Give me a fist pump, team council, and I believe you're getting ready to cook something today, aren't you? What's on the menu? A Southwest bean salad. Black bean salad? Yeah. All right. This is one of our favorites. We'll put the link to the recipe down in the details. And what we're doing is we are soaking black beans, and we are speeding up the soaking process by using hot water, which we're going to pour into this instant pot where the beans are. And normally they're supposed to soak for about eight hours. Well, this way you speed it up like two hours. And then we'll cook the beans. We don't ever use cans because they're more expensive. They've got a lot of salt in them, and they weigh a lot, and they take up more space. So we use dry beans because we've got tons of water and tons of power. And then once we get those soaked, we will pressure cook those in the instant pot for seven to eight minutes at high pressure. And then, bam, they're done. Cool them down, and then we'll make this wonderful black bean salad. And it's great, mostly cold, which, man, it's been really hot these days. And so a cold salad, it's healthy, it's filling, it's cheap, it's good stuff. So this is one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast. Here's another possibility of enhancing the black bean salsa with an egg. So one thing that we love to make is roasted baked potatoes. And the best way to bring out the flavor in these is to roast them to 400 degrees for a whole hour. What we're going to do is use the mash to make mashed potatoes. And you don't even need to add cream to these and have a wonderful roasted caramelization that's going on. Or sweet potato dip. Yeah, or sweet potato dip. You made that with a little cumin. I actually didn't think that was going to be that good, but it was really tasty. We'll put the recipe link down in the description. After provisioning and cooking, we were ready to head off to have some fun. Today we are sailing to Leonard Cay to snorkel the famous Sandy Cay, a place we can only go when there's no wind. Tomorrow should be the perfect day. We're at Leonard Cay and it's just a beautiful anchorage. It's peaceful. There's Valentine right over there. This is a great staging point for doing Sandy Cay, which is supposed to have the best snorkeling in the I'm going to go in. It's not quite low tide yet. I'm going to go down and see how close our keels are to the bottom. And one of the great things about having a catamaran in the Bahamas is the most beautiful protective anchorages are the shallowest. So thankful for that. We're going to be pushing it here. I think we're going to be inches away from the bottom. So let's go check it out. It is time to explore. We are off to Sandy Cay. It's been a long time since we've actually done this, isn't it? The water is beautiful. Perfect day. Look at that. Man, this is killer. That is beautiful. Ready to play? It's the super exciting diving express. This is Pelican Cay. We have just done some snorkeling at Sandy Cay and now we're exploring, which is good. It's a little bit chilly in the water and this is a bit nicer to be on land and getting warmed up. So super blustery day. We are headed back up towards Marsh Harbor and Hope Town hopefully to get our engines fixed. We've been down here at Lanyard Key. That's Lanyard Key there for the past week and really enjoyed being there. Protected bay. Beautiful. But now we are sailing only jib. We've got the jib actually a little bit reefed because winds are around 20 with gusts up to 22-23. So have her reefed a little bit. We are going to go past Sandy Key where we snorkeled the other day. Things are a little bit rougher today than they were. So no snorkeling but we're headed to Tahiti Beach. It's hard to see on camera but the swell is pretty big out here. That's open ocean to our right. Good thing is they're far in between so it's gentle. Yeah. Things have definitely smoothed out quite a bit which is nice when you get the wind from behind. Boy this boat really is happy. Doing six knots. All boats are You know what's crazy is the wind is about 16-17 going up to 20. We brought in all the sails and we're sailing right now. We're not sailing but we're moving at 4-6 with no engines on. That's an all-time first. That means there's a lot of wind. Our guess is the windage on our boat that's enabling us to sail. That's pretty cool.