Diary 4/25/2014: At Sea, Demonstrating, Rocking.

[title type="h5"]Friday, April 25, 2014. Crossing The Whole Mediterranean Sea. [/title] Our only scheduled day at sea. The girls spend most of the day lying in the sun around the pool. I join them at one point, but am wooed away from the lunch buffet by a Nathan's Famous hot dog with sauerkraut and fries. Good enough. [caption id="attachment_42228" align="alignnone" width="480"] The foredeck of the Eurodam, at sea.[/caption] The Eurodam has a demonstration kitchen in one of its larger auditoriums. A guy from Food & Wine Magazine is on board, giving cooking demos. When in the planning of this cruise I learned about this capability, I asked whether we could perform my own cooking event, for the private edification of the Eat Clubbers. The staff of the ship and its kitchen were superbly helpful with this, and it gave our group something to do after lunch. After telling my standard three anecdotes and getting the laughter they've provided for over thirty years, I show a simple recipe, the main point of which was to persuade people to learn the easy technique of deglazing. You sear a protein (fish, veal, chicken, steak, you name it) in a pan with a little oil or butter until both sides of the meat are browned. You remove the meat from the pan, either keeping it warm in the oven if it's pretty much all cooked or turning up the oven to finish the cooking if the meat is thick. In the meantime, you add an aqueous liquid to the pan and whisk it to dissolve the browned bits and juices the meat left behind. Then you add whatever you can think of that might reduce into a tasty sauce. And that's about it. I do this with veal in a pan with butter. I deglaze it with white wine, then added a bit of vanilla and some seasonings. The vanilla--not something you think of as going with veal--is just to show how great a range of possibilities the cook has. After that, a Q&A session about the usual subjects fills out the hour. And gives me a reason to exist, as far as the cruise is concerned. The Eat Club regathers at six-thirty for drinks in a room called the Explorers Club. It's a lot like the first spot we tried, but is more spacious and features live classical music. It's so pleasant that we decide this will be our watering hole for the remainder of the cruise. The last thing I expect is an objection to our being there. But that wouldn't come for two more days. In the meantime, we are crossing the Mediterranean Sea from its northern to its southern shores. I feel like Odysseus, and I recall the first two lines of the Odyssey in the original Greek--which I somehow remember from my Jesuit days. Mary Ann does not glory in the crossing. She joins me for dinner at Tamarind after the cocktail party, feeling as if she is about to lose her lunch. A few spoonfuls of won ton soup is all she can handle. Which is even less than it sounds. The cool-looking spoons in Tamarind (and the forks, too) are ridiculously too small to perform their jobs. Meanwhile, the motion of the ship approaches MA's threshold of mal-de-mer. She escapes from the grim possibilities before they can erupt, and is off to bed. Nothing can be done. [caption id="attachment_42230" align="alignnone" width="480"] Dinner without mate in Tamarind, aboard the Eurodam.[/caption] She insists that I stay and dine, so as not to disappoint Tamarind's very friendly staff, and so the food she ordered would not go to waste--the implication being that I must eat it all. As always, her heart is with the leftovers. [caption id="attachment_42231" align="alignnone" width="480"] Tamarind's seafood stew.[/caption] I finish dinner. The same two kinds of fish for sushi make that a dull course. Better is a stew of fish, mussels, scallops, and savory vegetables in a light broth. Although it's the best dish I've had on the ship so far, it's far short of being memorable. I visit to the piano bar and, for the first time, find a seat. A crowd of regulars, including a few Eat Clubbers, have found one another. The pianist Kenn (two n's, he insists) is not only a fine keyboard man but a very good singer and an entertaining personality. I'm not crazy about his choice of music at first, but he gets around to my kind of tunes as time goes by. [title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]