One of the things I enjoy when Ted and I travel is trying new foods. Even better is pre-paid food, like on a cruise. You’ve already paid for it, so you can eat it or not. If you don’t like it, you can choose something else at no additional cost.
One day, out of curiosity and with nothing else we needed to do at the time, Ted and I counted the choices presented at the dinner buffet on the ship. There were 139 different foods and beverages available–and that was at only one buffet! The two buffets always offered most of the same items, but there were usually several unique offerings at each. What an opportunity to try something new at no risk! Beer and house varieties of wine were included with meals; higher-end wines and mixed drinks were not.
- Sushi Bar: 17
- Cold bar (salads / salad ingredients / salad dressings): 28
- Hot bar (entrées / vegetables / sauces / soups): 27
- Breads: 5
- Desserts: 4 (sometimes there were 6, but not on the night we counted)
- Ice cream (flavors / toppings): 17
- Beverages (milk–3 / juice–2 / water–2 / coffee–4 / tea–12 /hot chocolate–1 /soft drinks–5 / wine–2 / beer–6)
The items listed above include only the buffet, not the other two casual restaurants or the two upscale restaurants also included with the cruise fare. Here’s the menu screen at the entrance to the buffet. Notice that it offers “International cuisine in a relaxed setting.” That means you may wear shorts, jeans, and/or T-shirts to dinner, unlike the upscale restaurants that require “casual elegance” in dress. (An oxymoron if I ever heard one!)
The desserts were always tempting. Fortunately, the portions were small, so trying two (or as many as you wanted) wasn’t unreasonable.
I get a kick out of Ted when we’re presented with different foods than we prepare at home. Although he is a far less selective (i.e., “picky”) eater than I am, he’s more comfortable in the safety zone of familiar foods that he’s seen and eaten before. For example, he wouldn’t try a purple poi dinner roll in Hawai’i because it was purple. After all, who eats purple bread products? The second time we had poi rolls, he dared to try one—maybe because I didn’t become gravely ill when I ate one the first time. If I can get him to try something he’s never seen, heard of, or tasted before, he usually enjoys it.
Even with all those food choices and a different menu every day, some foods on the 2023 BT were exceptional. Here’s an Egyptian meal we had for a family-style dinner as we cruised on the Nile River. The meatballs were out of this world, and everything else was deliciously spicy too. It took some coaxing to get Ted to try more than the meatballs. The meatballs were “safe” because he’d seen and eaten meatballs before, but he gets full credit for bravely trying some of the other dishes and admitting that they were good.
I don’t like to eat mushrooms because of their texture, but I like the flavor that mushrooms add to food. If I have a recipe that requires mushrooms, I use sliced fresh mushrooms so I can pick them out when I eat the food. After being assured there were no mushroom pieces in it, I ordered a bowl of mushroom soup as an appetizer one evening. (Ted declined—he’s never had mushroom soup.) It was delicious, but as the volume of the soup decreased in the bowl, it looked like mud or silt left behind. It was so good, I got Ted to try it the next time it appeared on the menu. He liked it too. BTW, that’s a bread stick poking out on the lower left side of the bowl.
These desserts in Istanbul get my vote for Best Presentation. Choc-o-holic Ted chose the chocolate (left), but didn’t want the currants, so I ate those; I chose apples with meringues (they look like marshmallows) and ice cream in the center. Both were wonderful. (My serving only looks bigger because it’s a closer photo shot—they were about equal size.) With really good food, I always think I’d like to have some more, but it always turns out to be just enough.
While I’m on the subject of desserts, we had this chocolate mousse in Cairo.
For a long time, I had no interest in cruising because all I ever heard people talk about was the shopping and the food. I’m not a big fan of shopping as an enjoyable pastime; it’s more of a utilitarian thing for me—find what you need, buy it, and go home. Neither do I like to “pig out” on food. Ted and I only took our first cruise because we wanted to visit Glacier Bay in Alaska and there was no way to get there without a ship. We tried to schedule a day trip out of Juneau, but a storm knocked out the dock and it wasn’t expected to be repaired for at least a year.
Our travel agent convinced us to take a cruise to Glacier Bay with the admonition that, “You don’t have to only shop and eat.” It was so true! Instead of shopping, Ted and I like to walk around and possibly meet some people from the area we’re visiting, and at meals, we make healthy choices. Those people who only talk about the food were right about one thing, though: cruise food is really good! On this cruise, we overheard a couple at another table talking about their buffet choices and the husband remarked, “You really can eat healthy on a cruise, can’t you?” Yes, you can—and you don’t have to shop either!