4th September 2009

Day 7

Quote of the day :- 'All our sweetest hours fly fastest.'

How true that is, as we near the end of this holiday.

Today we were all at sea!
Had a leisurely breakfast first, then went for a walk round the deck before attending the ship's version of Can't Cook, Won't Cook with our Executive Chef Klaus Kraberger, our illustrious Captain, Terje Ulset, and the comedian and singer for this trip, Bob Taylor. What a performance this was! The Captain and Bob were in competition with each other to do everything right and ending up doing it wrong. It was funny to watch but difficult to describe here. The Captain kept taking a back seat and letting one of the galley staff take over for him. Then he was seen swopping his pan with Bob's because the contents looked better than his own! The recipe had white wine in it and it looked as if they were swigging as much as was going in the pans ! They were cooking a Mushroom Risotto for the main course and a dessert called Austrian Kaiser-Schmarm. Said to be a well known Austrian dessert to be found on the menu of most restaurants there. It is also called 'Mehlspeis'. It was created during a hunting trip for the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef 1. The Emperor liked it so much he jokingly named it 'Schmarm' or 'nonsense' - so it was named the 'Kaiser-Schmarm' or literally translated 'Emperor's Nonsense'.
If anyone would like these recipes I can provide them :)

Time for lunch by the time they had finished cooking.
After lunch I took my stitching up to the top of the ship and sat in the observatory in my favourite place.
It was lovely sitting up there watching the sea go by.
Later I returned to the cabin for a shower and to get ready for our last formal dinner of the cruise.

After dinner it was time for the evening show. Tonight it was the Black Watch Crew Show. Lots of the staff put together a truly great show, with some beautiful costumes from the different countries they represented. They are not only good at their day jobs, but put on a superb show for us.
At 10.15 there was the Parade of the Chefs and also a very fine display of fruit and vegetable carvings, all the different kinds of bread they make and also carvings of butter and ice.