Cruise Food - gotta love the soup

The food on the cruise was the best food I've had on vacation. The place we've been going to in cancun lately is very good... but the cruise was even better.

Soup
The biggest surprise was the soup. I don't eat a lot of soup, and I pretty much only make creams soups, although I've been thinking I should branch out and try some others.

The menu on the cruise was different every night, and usually consisted of two or three soups. At least one hot and one cold. I love cold soups and "different" soups. I had one soup the first night and from then on had two with every meal. I had:

• pumpkin soup - room temperature with some asia seasoning
  
• chilled zuchinni in cream
  
• chilled leeche cream
  
• chilled strawberry cream with mint
  
• wild mushroom
  
• cream of broccilli and cheese

Argh... I knew I'd forget if I didn't write them down. Should have got a menu. If I remember more I'll add them.

Anyway, the chilled cream soups were excellent. Some very light and refreshing, some just a very cool combination of flavors - either from the main ingredient or from the spices they added. I looked forward every night to what new soup they'd have.

Pizza
There was a galley tour the last day and I went on it. There was about a 20 minute talk ahead of time, and then we went through the kitchen. The actual tour was someone interesting... but I've seen big kitchens before and they weren't doing anything that interesting (prepping plates for dinner mostly). But the talk was cool. Learned that cruise ships have the highest health regulations and they are surprise inspected 3 or 4 times a year. Also that all the food comes out of the US and is very fresh.

Besides the normal reastaurants and the buffets, they have a little pizza kitchen where you can get a slice of pizza (or a whole one if you want). I grabbed some pizza a few times late at night. It was pretty good (nice cornmeal dusted crust), but not gourmet or super spectacular. Someone asked, "How many pizzas do you make on a cruise?" and the answer was: "Well this cruise is pretty much a vacation for the pizza cook. There are only about 100 under 20 year olds on this trip, so he has only made 2500. During spring break when almost everyone is under 20, he makes... 50,000."

50,000 pizza... for 1700 people on a 5 day trip. Wow. Thats almost 6 pizzas a day per person.