A few Sunday table scraps

Yesterday was a bit of a good food day, breakfast, farmers market, and last night’s dinner of salmon roulettes with spinach stuffing, and lime thai-style rice in coconut milk.

While I was having breakfast, I saw that my local watering hole Tonic is starting up their Wine Month again. Moose and I used to “sort of” take advantage of this, since we’d just buy the bottle of wine anyway as none of their “entrees” (at the time) were vegan, so he’d find a suitable dish anyway even if it didn’t qualify for the special. I think the special would be better shared with groups of 4 or more going out to dinner since with 2 people, one bottle of wine is fine, but you generally get through your meal quickly enough that all you’re doing is trying to finish it off. I think with more people, the meal would stretch out a bit and plus there would be more wine to share!

I’ve been doing a little cleaning, and going through my souvenirs from the Carnival Cruise and I found the handout that we got when we took the Galley tour:

Welcome to our Galley Tour, we hope you find it interesting. Below you will find some Fun Facts about the Food and Beverage operation.

1. The Food and Beverage department is the largest department on board with over 500 Team members. This includes 120 cooks, 220 dining room servers, 70 bar team members and 70 galley stewards and provision staff.
2. We use over 20,000 pounds of meat a week, 10,000 pounds of chickens and poultry and further 15,000 pounds of grocery and fresh produce.
3. We use over 48,000 eggs a week… and we only have one chicken on board.
4. We have enough juice, coffee & tea to fill the swimming pools 3 times over.
5. We also consume over 1000 gallons of milk every week.
6. Square foot for square foot, the galley is more expensive than the engine room and also out weighs it.
7. We serve 1500 main courses in less than 25 minutes and we wash 18,000 plates every evening. During dinner service we are proud to declare that one plate per second is leaving the galley to be served.
8. A final note: on weekly basis, the consumption in the bars is 6000 gallons of pre-mixed drinks, beers, and liquor.

I can’t help but loving that last point and feeling proud to have made my own contribution towards that statistic. 🙂 Still, it was pretty amazing to think about how much food they’re getting out of that kitchen, and also how much redundant food they must prepare, since I’m sure they’ve already planned on making a certain number of dishes prior to actually taking the orders and considering the number of evenings Luis, our table steward, encouraged us to try multiple or different entrees at the same meal, there must be a lot of overlap. I can’t even imagine what it takes to run a regular restaurant, let alone a floating resort, but I bet Gordon Ramsay would be impressed.

After a brief Q&A session, they gave us a tour of the galleys and it was pretty cool as everything was already in motion to prepare items for that night’s meal. We saw the finished plates already out. I don’t know what the term for it is, but I’ve seen it in other restaurants where a higher-up chef will create one dish and then the lower-ranking chefs use that model to prepare their own plates — anyway, we saw those and were starting to make our own decisions about dinner that night.

I’d love to go on some sort of foodie vacation, gastro-travel anyone?