Category Archives: Humor

February 27, 2013 · 5:35 am

Behind the Scenes on the Norwegian Star — The Kitchen, Bakery, and Food Stores


Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls — It Tolls for Thee Carnival Triumph, Thee Carnival Splendor, and Thee Other Carnival Ships

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls — It Tolls for Thee Carnival Triumph, Thee Carnival Splendor, and Thee Other Carnival Ships

If you’re into the current stainless kitchen appliances craze, you’d certainly tire of it quickly aboard a cruise ship.  Unless, of course, you’re on a Carnival cruise ship, in which case you’d be ecstatic just seeing the inside of a place that once held unspoiled food as you’re being towed back into port in the aftermath of the de rigueur engine or laundry room fire.  A few days without edible food makes even an MRE sound like a gourmet meal.  But, once again, I digress.

Stainless everywhere

Stainless . . .

Stainless . . .

Stainless Everywhere

And Way too Much to Eat

And Way too Much to Eat

It’s truly incredible to think how much food is prepared for upwards of 3,500 passengers and crew.  That’s a lot of chow.  Speaking of chow, my inside industry sources tell me that there’s absolutely no truth to the rumor that Carnival ships are going to start placing emergency supplies of Purina in cabins next to the life-jackets.  Oh, wait, this article is about NCL.  Sorry.  Got sidetracked.

Amazingly, there are even charts posted about the kitchens displaying the different Main Dining Room fare depending on the day of the cruise.

Menus

Menus

And More Menus

And More Menus

Everywhere you look you’ll find culinary crew creating cuisine for crazed cruise customers craving everything from cold cuts to cantaloupes to cold-water crustaceans for their carnivorous contemplations.

Culinary Crew Creatively Cutting Cutlets

Culinary Crew Creatively Cutting Cutlets

Cooking Away

Cooking Away

But I Don't Do Big Macs!

But I Don’t Do Big Macs!

By the way, did I mention stainless?  Take another look and this steel-clad kitchen:

Dishing It Out

Dishing It Out

The Racks

The Racks

Where's Tonight's Menu?

Where’s Tonight’s Menu?

But there’s more to a kitchen than just the kitchen.  A kitchen wouldn’t be a kitchen with a bakery.  This particular bakery makes everything from chocolate chip cookies (which our tour group sampled) to French baguettes and everything in between.

Bread Dough Rising

Bread Dough Rising

Baked Bread Cooling

Baked Bread Cooling

And then there are the various food storage areas.  This part of the tour was positively chilling, as we walked into storage areas from everything from dairy products to frozen foods.

Chilling

Chilling

Positively Chilling

Positively Chilling

A Cool Place to Be

A Cool Place to Be

Keeping Stuff in Cold Storage

Keeping Stuff in Cold Storage

While we’re on the subject of food storage, I understand that Carnival Cruises is issuing all passengers long sticks and stocking copious quantities of hotdogs and marshmallows.  That way, when there’s an engine or laundry room fire, the passengers can roast their own food as they camp out on the decks.  No word yet on how Carnival intends for their passengers to trench out a latrine area, but there have been reports that some of their ship pools have been emptied of water and filled with dirt.

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February 25, 2013 · 5:35 am

Behind the Scenes on the Norwegian Star — Recycling, Backstage, and the Laundry


Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls — It Tolls for Thee Carnival Triumph, Thee Carnival Splendor, and Thee Other Carnival Ships

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls — It Tolls for Thee Carnival Triumph, Thee Carnival Splendor, and Thee Other Carnival Ships

It turns out that when you’re the captain’s favorite mystery author, sometimes you’re invited for a behind-the-scenes tour of the ship.  Impressive, isn’t it?  Eat your heart out, Nelson DeMille.  Take that, Dan Brown.  Better luck next time, Stephen King.

At other times you just luck into a tour even if the captain has never heard of you.  As we used to say in air traffic control, “I’d rather be lucky than good,” so Ursula and I got tours of the Norwegian Star even though nobody aboard had heard of either me or my novels.

Over the next three blog articles I’m going to take you on a tour of a working cruise ship . . . as opposed to the non-working cruise ships of, say, Carnival Cruise Line, or the once-worked-until-the-captain-ran-aground ships of Carnival subsidiary Costa Cruises.  By the way, I hear Carnival is having a fire sale.  Meanwhile, the rumor over at Costa is that they’re preparing a hard-hitting advertising campaign with three new spokespersons — Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Today we’ll take a quick look at three areas of NCL’s Norwegian Star: the laundry, the recycling center, and the backstage area for the ship’s massive, 900-seat Stardust Theater.

NCL are an absolute marvel in the area of recycling.  It’s absolutely amazing how much of their refuse gets off-loaded when they return to port at the end of a cruise, and the crew in charge of recycling gets to keep as a bonus the monies made selling to recyclers.  Now that’s incentive!  Just how good are they?  NCL have won environmental awards from the ports in Venice (two years running), San Francisco (three years running), and Seattle.  In 2010 NCL were awarded at the national level by the U.S. Coast Guard the William M. Benkert Marine Environmental Protection Gold Award — a first for any cruise line ever.

Recycling Cardboard

Recycling Cardboard

Recycling Everything Else

Recycling Everything Else

Compare that to Costa Cruises winning the White Star Line’s prestigious Andrea Doria Trophy for most commercial tonnage sunk in a single year by a noncombatant.  But I digress.

Next up is a look at the backstage area of the Stardust Theater.  Such a small, small space for such a large, large theater.  Unfortunately, most of the backstage tour was in areas too dark to photograph.  That is, until we hit the Bright Lights of Broad—  Er, I mean, the bright lights of the dressing room.  There was more wattage going into those makeup lights than that generated by your average, everyday adrift Carnival cruise ship.  The heat radiating off those mirrors was almost as intense as the heat coming out of the laundry room of the Carnival Ecstasy or the engine rooms of the Carnival Tropicale, Carnival Splendor, and the Carnival Triumph.

Behind the Bright LIghts

Behind the Bright LIghts

Colorful Costumes

Colorful Costumes

Cramped Closets

Cramped Closets

And finally we’ll take a quick peek at the laundry room.  I must say that the machinery in this place simply left me in awe.  There were gigantic machines for washing, Godzilla-sized dryers, and even linen pressing/folding machines that made short work of everything from sheets and pillowcases to napkins, washrags, and towels.

I was especially impressed with the method employed to dry the laundry — actual drying machines as opposed to the Carnival Ecstasy method of just setting the laundry room ablaze.

On Wednesday we’ll look at the most vital area of any cruise ship — the heart, soul, and brain of the vessel: the kitchens, bakeries, and food stores.  And finally on Friday we’ll finish up with the best view on the ship, the place where you’ll find the most important members of the crew — The Crow’s Nest Bar and the bartenders who serve . . . .  Ooops.  I mean the bridge, the navigation crew, and the guy with all the braids on his uniform who almost never invites me to his table (except for that one time on another NCL ship, but that’s another story).

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February 3, 2013 · 8:23 am

And the Superbowl Results Are . . .


  Versus  

And the winner is (or will be):

San Francisco 49ers 34

Baltimore Ravens 30

Come back after the game, compare my prognostications to the final score, and you’ll seen see why I almost never play office pools dealing with sports.

By the way, don’t forget to try my Super Spicy Superbowl dip today Jalapeño Pesto Dip:

The great things about this recipe are:

  • It’s healthy as all get out.
  • It’s so tasty you’ll completely forget how healthy it is.
  • It’s not as spicy hot as it sounds (although it’s definitely not for the timid of tongue, either).
  • It goes great with anything from tortilla chips to corn chips to potato chips to even pretzels.
  • It’s so simple to make even a husband can do it.
  • The leftover jalapeño pesto is great on a whole variety of dishes ranging from omelets to burgers (use as a topping)  and even mixed with ground beef for tacos or chili.  By all means use your imagination with the leftover pesto, because you’ll probably think up dozens of uses for it.

Ingredients:

  • 2 pounds fresh whole  jalapeño peppers
  • 2 tsp. ground cumin
  • 1 tsp. granulated or fresh crushed garlic
  • 1 tsp. sea salt
  • ⅓ cup good extra virgin olive oil or other healthy monounsaturated oil

Step 1. Bring to boil just enough water to immerse the jalapeños.  Once the water is boiling, add the jalapeños and bring the water back to boiling.  Gently boil the jalapeños, stirring occasionally, for fifteen minutes.  Drain the jalapeños and set aside until they are cool enough to handle.

Step 2. Slice the jalapeños in half lengthwise and remove the stems.  Now, this next procedure is where you control the heat to some extent.  On most of the jalapeños, remove the seeds and the ribs to which those seeds are attached.  Keep the seeds and ribs on approximately one-third of the jalapeños, choosing in particular those jalapeños with very white, healthy-looking seeds and discarding those seeds that are dingy or brown in color.  Increasing the number of seeds and ribs retained will increase the heat; decreasing that number will help to tame it.

Step 3. Place the jalapeños, cumin, garlic, and salt into a food processor.  While pulsing, slowly drizzle in the olive oil.  Do no overdo the processing or you’ll destroy those beautiful white seeds and lose texture, but you do want a fairly smooth consistency.

Serve with either warm or cold with your favorite chips. Warm is particularly interesting, especially if you contrast that with a well-refrigerated California onion dip (one envelope of Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix combined with one pint of reduced-fat sour cream).  Serve these two dips side-by-side and watch eager fans alternate between the two of them.

And since this is listed under Wine & Food the next question would have to be, what kind of wine would you serve with this?  Well, first of all, this is definitely an accompaniment to beer, especially a good, fairly strong ale.  But if you would like wine with this, it’ll have to be one that helps tame the fire.  That suggests a semisweet white.  Think:  Johannisberg or German Rieslings, Chenin Blanc, or Gewürztraminer.  The cooler white wine serving temperatures supply immediate relief and the sweetness helps neutralize the capsaicin (the compound that gives peppers their “heat”) in the long term.

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