Merry Eating Day!

The holidays are here, which means it's time to bloat the twenty extra pounds I normally carry around with me to a seasonally appropriate thirty. It also means massive quantities of food must be prepared in order to provide at least five pounds per plateload, regardless of whether we're talking about a salad plate, a dinner plate, or a dessert plate.

Yesterday (Christmas Eve-Eve) was primary cooking day for our Christmas day celebrations. In two days, we will feed a total of eight people -- the five who live under our roof, plus my parents and Brother Tom. Naturally, then, we browned three pounds of sausage, rolled eight pounds of beef and pork into meatballs and browned them, then tossed all of that browned meaty goodness into a vat of homemade sauce.

Next came cookies. Simplicity was the motto of the day, so we kept it to one kind of cookie -- the ubiquitous peanut butter Kiss cookie -- that could be easily thrown together and baked without distracting too much from the browning of the meatballs and sausage. Fresh from their morning meat-rolling calisthenics, the kids helped roll out four trays of peanut buttery deliciousness, in addition to shucking several dozen Hershey's Kisses.

After a brief break to clean a pan, or seven, it was time to experiment with something new -- cinnamon pumpkin roll with chocolate mascarpone ganache.

I've baked many things, but never a finished cake that had to be rolled. It seemed like an awful lot of work to go through just to create a delivery method for getting pumpkin cake and chocolate ganache to my mouth, but I was game. Besides, Giada de Laurentis and the Food Network wouldn't steer me wrong.

To Giada's credit, both the cake and the ganache are amazingly delectable, however rolling the pumpkin spice cake might not have been my finest culinary hour. I passed the first test, flipping the pan and dropping the cake onto a towel dusted with powdered sugar. Trouble is, my definition of dusting is slightly more aggressive than Giada's. The cake landed with a satisfying plop and shot powdered sugar up and out like a Christmas-tinged mushroom cloud full of elf fairies and pumpkiny aromas. The next bit, actually rolling the cake without breaking, mangling, tearing, shearing, or otherwise causing traumatic damage to said cake, was less messy but much more sketchy. In the end, I manhandled it into something that roughly resembles a rolled cake.

Today continued with more baking. After all, you can't serve seventeen pounds of meat and sauce without homemade Italian bread, and where one loaf might suffice, two certainly will provide that measure of overkill necessary for a proper holiday feast.

Oh, did I mention the cannoli? Yeah, I bought twenty pre-made cannoli shells (half of them covered in chocolate, because they were there) and prepped two pounds of filling so we can stuff them on Christmas day short before we sit down to eat our six-and-a-half pounds of meat, sauce, pasta and bread each. That way, the cannoli can set up in the fridge without getting the shells all soggy. You have to plan ahead for these things, you know.

The end result is that, by the time we tuck the kids into bed tomorrow night, I should have gained almost the entire extra ten pounds. I'll leave a tiny bit of space for that last cookie before bed.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

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