Ship of Fools

We enjoy cruising, which is why we recently spent seven days on Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas to celebrate our upcoming twentieth anniversary.

We enjoy having our room cleaned daily (sometimes several times a day). We enjoy being offered a variety of activities from which to choose. We enjoy sitting by the pool napping, secure in the knowledge we couldn't be doing anything productive even if we wanted to. And we enjoy eating food we didn't have to prepare, multiple times a day, without regard for cholesterol levels or blood sugar because, after all, we're on vacation, dammit.

I do expect, however, should we choose to cruise again in the next few years, we might elect to sail on a slightly smaller vessel. There's a critical mass of passengers a ship can take on before service begins to slip from specialized to generic, leaving one to come away feeling more like a sheep in a herd instead of a pearl in an oyster.

The Freedom of the Seas carries 4,300 passengers and 1,200 staff at maximum capacity. That's a population greater than that of 10 of the 12 incorporated towns in the county we call home, and roughly one-third of the population of our town.

A sane man wouldn't willingly spend a week locked in a confined area with one-third of his town's folk -- sleeping in cramped conditions under one roof, eating the same food, sharing the same limited selection of public toilets. But you put that confined space out at sea, fill up a few pools, light up a few cabaret shows, keep the alcohol and consumme flowing, and it suddenly changes from a potential nightmarish post-hurricane shelter at the New Orleans Superdome to a tropical luxury vacation.

Our biggest issue with the size of the ship, however, wasn't necessarily the service. Sure, the pizza in the promenade was low-grade cardboard topped with plastic cheese. It's true, some of the passengers weren't held to any kind of dress code in the formal dining room. Yes, Royal Caribbean's different onboard services are so siloed that we personally had to track down the manager of one of the onboard restaruants in order to have a bill corrected, and there were only enough 3D glasses for a quarter of the seats in the ship's theater.

All of that aside, the real problem with being cooped up with so many people for such a long period of time is the people themselves. Taken individually, human beings are tolerable, at best. Gather together a crowd of us and instill in us a bloated sense of entitlement and our true colors come blazing through with unfiltered glory.

Like the time, during our honeymoon cruise, when we took the galley tour. As we stood there waiting for the line to move, a father and his young child were separated by marauding band of senior citizens who, apparently, felt they were above the need to stand in line with the rest of us rabble. As they worked their way along ahead of the rest of us, but not quite out of earshot, I commented to My Lovely Wife:

"It's okay. They just want to make sure they see the kitchen before they die."

This time around the dinner table proved the most interesting place to meet unique people. And, yes, by unique I mean irritating.

We had know-it-alls who commandeered dinner conversation by telling (and sometimes retelling several times during the same evening) pointless stories that frequently disproved the very points they were trying to make. We had die-hard cruise loyalists who mistook detailing the difference in quality of free alcohol on the various cruise lines for interesting conversations. And, finally, we had borderline alcoholics who didn't realize their incessant discussion about the quantity of free alcohol on our particular cruise had me wondering if we would need to stage an intervention before formal night. Let's just say dinner conversation was strained, at best.

We did meet several pairs of people at random locations around the ship with whom we managed to have quite pleasant conversation, which was a relief because it meant we might not be the social misfits at our dinner table.

In the end, we will cruise again some time in the future, but next time we'll be sure to bring the kids, or go with friends, or maybe just hire some friendly looking people to sit at dinner with us.



2014 Mark Feggeler

The Noshing Neanderthal

According to an article in the latest Reader's Digest, egg yolks and lemon will be the new "big" things in eating this year. I'm not sure who, exactly, determines that egg yolks and lemon will be the new "big" things, but that's the prediction, nonetheless.

It's sad, really, because even though I'm an ardent food admirer, I'm not a particularly "big" fan of either egg yolks or lemon-flavored anything. Egg yolks are fine as a baking ingredient, or for omelets and scrambled eggs, but that's about it. And lemon's only purpose, in my humble opinion, is to make you feel better about the low-grade chemical furniture lacquer you spray all over your house when you're dusting. Neither item is going to win a popularity contest if I'm the judge.

But the article states there are other hot food stuffs to be watching out for this year, so perhaps I am despairing too soon.

Gluten-free pastas will hit the ground running, which is good for them because I'm likely to have a sizable head start when they arrive en force. See, I'm willing to scale back in certain areas for the sake of trying to save myself from gaining a few unneeded ounces, but I can't fathom the purpose of a gluten-free pasta. I'm not diabetic, or even pre-diabetic, or even predisposed to the potentiality of the possibility of becoming diabetic, so I'm not sure why I'm suddenly supposed to be excited about a variety of non-flour, carb-free, gluten-free, tough-as-hemp pastas that probably don't taste anything like real pasta.

It's also the year of dairy-free dairy products. Almond milk, soy milk, coconut milk, and any other artificially thickened watery extracts of non-cow origin are supposed to be all the rage, making real milk passé. Funny, but I like my milk to taste like milk, and fresh milk at that, not something that's left over when you accidentally leave a jug of milk sitting in the back of the fridge two weeks beyond the recommended expiration date. Again, I've managed to scale back from whole milk to skim milk, but I refuse to drink anything calling itself milk that didn't come from a mammal.

Unattractive poached chicken.

Then there's cooking methods. Seems steaming and poaching will make a comeback as people across the developed world embrace these healthier ways to prepare foods without depleting their nutritional values.

Yummy grilled chicken.

But have you ever poached anything? I haven't, so I looked it up. Poaching involves cooking in liquids at low temperatures. It requires patience and time, neither of which I have in any great abundance. Poaching a chicken breast can take up to thirty minutes. I can grill that sucker in less than ten, or five if I slice it thin and turn the grill on high. Carcinogens from burning the meat? Part of the price we pay for life at the top of the food chain. Besides, how many times has the Cooking Channel told me "color equals flavor?"

Maybe I'm the problem here.

Maybe my unwillingness to let go of the conventions with which I'm familiar in favor of the fun fads of the food industry makes me a culinary stick in the mud -- a noshing neanderthal. But no matter how many times I read about the power of kale to cleanse my intestinal tract and pack my bloodstream with four-thousand times the daily recommended allowance of every vitamin known to man, nothing is going to make me want to eat it. It's a bland, tough leaf and I'm not a rabbit.

At least kale is on the way out, or so I've heard lately. And that's the best news about fad foods -- their fifteen minutes of fame come and go fairly quickly. Wait long enough and perhaps a food you actually like will be the next "big" thing.

Of course, a food like chocolate doesn't need the PR. After all, it is chocolate.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

Not-So-Mellow Mushroom

There's a reason I finally learned to make pizza. That reason is the Mellow Mushroom.

It's been a couple years since we last ate at our local Mellow Mushroom. Maybe it was the burnt pretzels, or the burnt pizza crust, or the fact we waited nearly ninety minutes for the burnt pizza to reach our table, but whatever it was I knew I was done with the place. The real shame of it is how excited we were for the restaurant to open. Mellow Mushrooms in other cities had never failed to please. Their service is timely and their food noticeably unburnt, both of which are qualities I admire in restaurants.

As a result, we were justifiably delighted to hear someone was going to open a Mellow Mushroom only a few miles from our house. We watched and commented as construction progressed.

"Did you see they hung their signage?"

"Did you see they paved the parking lot?"

"Did you see they're going to have an outdoor patio?"

My Lovely Wife and I were so anxious to have a Mellow Mushroom nearby, we couldn't even wait for the kids to be available to try it out. The first day the restaurant was open to the public, while the kids were at school eating peanut butter sandwiches, we were sitting on the covered patio dining on delicious items from the Mellow Mushroom lunch menu. And it was good. Good enough for us to recommend the restaurant to our friends and family.

As time pressed on, however, we noticed inconsistencies in the quality of food preparation and long waits for tables (which is good for the restaurant) and for the delivery of food to the tables (which isn't any good for anybody). People around town started grumbling. We started grumbling. That last time we tried the restaurant, the ninety-minute wait for burnt pizza was the straw that broke the caterpillar's hooka. I found a Mario Batalli pizza dough online and we never looked back.

Then, just last week, the local high school jazz band performed at the restaurant to raise funds for the band program. Our Daughter and her boyfriend, Señor Awesome, both are in regular band and Señor Awesome is featured prominently in the jazz band, so we thought: "What the heck. Let's give Mellow Mushroom another chance and help raise money for the school band at the same time."

I would like to list now the reasons why we should have stayed home, eaten our own homemade pizza, and simply written the school band program a check.

1. Non-burnt pretzels, served promptly: This sounds like a promising start, but in hindsight it really wasn't. All it did was draw us into a false sense of security about the rest of the meal.
2. A Confused Waitress: For obvious reasons, a bad omen. When you tell the waitress you want a cheese pizza with basil and Roma tomatoes (both items from the list of toppings in the menu) and she doesn't understand what you're talking about, you know you're in trouble. And the fact no one at Mellow Mushroom seems to realize cheese pizza with basil and Roma tomatoes is commonly known as a Pizza Margherita also says a lot about this place's pizza bona fides.
3. One-Hour Wait Until Management Steps In: Yes, one hour. In an industry governed by ticket times and the expediting of food from the kitchens, it took the assistant manager one hour to realize we had not yet received our food, but only because we called it to his attention. At least he was kind enough to assure us our meal would be on the house.
4. Another 45 Minutes After Management Stepped In: We waited impatiently for a total 105 minutes from time of order to the time our pizzas were placed in front of us. During that time, I somehow managed to refrain from pointing out to the assistant manager that pizza normally takes five minutes to prepare and ten minutes to bake. Allowing the dough to rise is the only time consuming process, but I have to think if any place of business is going to have a ready supply of risen pizza dough, it's a restaurant that specializes in pizza.
5. A Confused Waitress, Part 2: After being reassured multiple times by multiple people we would not pay a penny for our meal, the waitress came to the table to ask how we wanted to split the bill. She might have gotten a tip if, just once during the two hours we sat at her table, she had refilled our glasses.

The manager arrived in time to apologize and offer us certificates for free food the next time we dined at his restaurant. Fortunately, he neglected to provide us the promised certificates before we left.



© 2013 Mark Feggeler