When gourmet cook/naturalist Nogg was asked to cook for 20 guests who were on whale research vacations, she figured it would be a breeze. Instead she encountered lack of time and budget,and a two hour ferry ride to get supplies. The second year she plied her skills on a sixty foot converted trawler in Southeast Alaska. Glacier ice was used to cool food and that was the good news. Cooking in a galley the size of a poker table was enough of a challenge but then she found out only two of the four burners on the stove worked when the oven was on; the largest turkey she could fit in that oven was 10-12 pounds. And just to make life even more of a challenge, the departing cook had spent most of the season"s budget for staples on black beans and miso soup!!! Since the guests weren"t paying for peanut butter sandwiches, Nogg had to create dishes that were easy to prepare but qualified as semi-gourmet meals. And wearing her photo/journalist hat, she still needed to make time to photograph whales and other wildlife. For almost five years Nogg worked Alaska in the summer, then followed the whales to Hawaii for the winter. Each chapter of the book starts with one of her photos from those trips. As a world traveler, she has collected recipes from friends and colleagues from varied cultural backgrounds. Nogg converted the material so that most dishes feed four to six people and have ingredients available in the United States. There"s also a section for salt substitutes and most recipes offer suggestions for replacing high fat content ingredients.