Back on the Ship After Copenhagen

After our tour of Copenhagen, we were back on the ship and heading toward Rostock, Germany. We knew that it would be a very long and busy day the next day, but first was our third dinner on the ship.

For the third straight day, I started with a pasta appetizer. Tonight was the Pappardelle alla forestale which are wide egg noodles in a light cream sauce with sautéed mushrooms. After they added some freshly grated parmesan cheese on the top, here’s what I got.

 

Joan started with another of the chilled fruit soups that they served in the main dining room, the chilled Watermelon Soup. It looks very much like the strawberry bisque that she had the night before.

 

For my second starter I went with the Fire Roasted Chicken in Sesame Dressing. It was served with a BLT salad. What you really got was a chicken leg. The sesame dressing was not too spicy and gave the chicken a nice kick. Here’s what it looks like:

 

For my main course, I got something that I don’t think I had ordered before. I got the Broiled Center Cut Pork Chop with Mexican Mole. It was served with slow cooked red cabbage and apple and some mac and cheese. The pork chop was tender and the mole sauce was kind of on the side rather than the pork chop being coated in it. The mac and cheese was the same side that I got the first night and was wonderful as always. Here’s what they brought me:

 

Now it was on to dessert. Both of the desserts that we got, I believe, were new to us. I don’t know that we had seen this menu before. It makes sense, as we normally take seven day cruises. This being a 12 day cruise, there were some menus that we don’t often see.

Well, Joan, being the strawberry lover that she is, had to order the Variations of Strawberry. This dessert was really three little desserts all featuring strawberry. She received a small Upside Down Strawberry Cake, Strawberry Sorbet and Strawberry and Mascarpone cream. It was all plated nicely together and served like this:

 

While Joan went for strawberry, I had to go for chocolate. I ordered the Chocolate Mousse Crepe served in Banana Bisque with Candied fruit. Of course, I had to also get a scoop of that wonderful vanilla gelato. Here they are together:

 

The chocolate crepe was very good. I expected the banana bisque to be a little on the thicker side, more like a pudding than a soup. Over all I liked this dessert. Then again, it’s hard not to like any dessert at least a little.

So, that was dinner. It was a pretty straightforward main dining room dinner. There is one other thing that I want to mention before I sign off this segment. That would be our wait staff. These are the individuals that you probably interact with the most on your cruise. You see them every night and the quality of your dining room staff can make or break your cruise. I have to say that we had a wonderful staff of three serving us on this cruise. Here they are:

 

On the left, we have our head waiter Renato from the Philippines. He was assisted by the other two. In the middle was probably the most outgoing assistant waiter that I’ve had, Audi from Indonesia. And finally on the right there was Dimitar from Macedonia. The entire cruise, these guys did a wonderful job and I just wanted to show everyone who was bringing all the great food in the main dining room.

Next time, we head off for a very long day touring Berlin, Germany and along the way we get an authentic German lunch from a unique place from our perspective. You’ll see why next time.

Until next time,

Mike

A Stop in Copenhagen

Our first stop on our amazing 12 day Baltic cruise was the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen. We don’t always take shore tours when we make stops on our cruises. This time, however, we decided to take one in each port since we had never been to Europe and we wanted to see all we could in the time we had.

Here in Copenhagen, we took a tour entitled “Copenhagen City Tour and Tivoli Gardens.” It was just as it sounds; a nice tour of the city and then time on our own at Tivoli Gardens. Our first stop was at one of the most popular tourist attractions in Copenhagen, the Little Mermaid statue. The statue was based on the fairy tale written by Denmark native Hans Christian Andersen. The story was then, of course, picked up by Disney and made into the animated movie. Here is The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen.

After a short bus ride, we arrived at the Royal Square which is the residence of the royal family of Denmark. We walked into the square where there were four almost identical palaces in each corner. Our tour guide explained that the since there were no flags flying on any of the palaces, that no one was home at the time. He also told us that the palace on our immediate left was the home of the King and Queen of Denmark, the one on our immediate right was the home of the Crown Prince and Princess and the one adjacent on our right was the home of the Second Son. I asked what the fourth palace was for and he answered “guest palace.” That must be nice to have an entire palace just for guests. He explained that it was mostly used for visiting heads of state. Here are a couple pictures of the Royal Square. The first shows the King and Queen’s residence and the “guest palace” and the second shows the “kids’” houses.

 

We took a short walk along the water back to our bus and we were off to Tivoli Gardens. We chose the excursion that included Tivoli Gardens because Joan and I like to take the occasional trip to Disneyland and it has been said that Tivoli Gardens was one of Walt Disney’s inspirations for Disneyland. The park has been open since 1843 and is the second oldest amusement park in the world. The oldest is also in Denmark. We didn’t have a lot of time so we only rode one ride, the Rutschebanen. That translates to “The Roller Coaster” (original, I know) in English. It is one of the oldest operating roller coasters in the world and actually is operated by a brakeman who rides in the middle of each train. Here is a look at the train coming into the station:

 

Now it was time for some food (what this blog is really all about). The first place we headed was a place called Vaffelbageriet. According to our guide, this place served “Home made waffles, ice cream and pastries.” We really stopped here first because our guide said that he was going to “make station” there. We just wanted to be sure that we still saw someone we knew and were still in the right place. Of course we browsed the menu and saw some interesting waffles. We weren’t getting to Belgium this trip so we thought that this would be a good time. We got what we knew was a Liege style waffle with some rich chocolate on it. Here’s where we stopped and what we got:

 

We decided after that wonderful treat that we really needed something more substantial (backward I know but we really didn’t care). We wanted something a little out of the ordinary and local and after looking up and down our park guide found Bofgrillen. It said in the guide that it served “Danish steak- and pork sandwiches.” Sounded good to us. When we got to the stand we decided that we would order one steak and one pork sandwich and share them both. Here’s the pork sandwich:

It was a sliced pork tenderloin that was topped with something they called “Danish sauce.” It was a mayonnaise based sauce with a little more tanginess. Here is the steak sandwich.

 

It was more like a shredded steak that was served with pickled cucumbers. They were a little less sweet than your ordinary pickle and gave the sandwich a nice crunch when you ate it. All-in-all we liked our local sandwiches.

One of the other nice things about this stop on our tour was that the Hard Rock Café Copenhagen was just outside the gates of Tivoli Gardens. We met our guide about 15 minutes before we were supposed to leave and told him where we would be. We were able to get Joan’s shot glass and pin and as we were leaving the Hard Rock, our group was coming right by. Three Hard Rocks down (Dublin, London, and Copenhagen) and a potential three left to go (Berlin, Helsinki, and Amsterdam).

We headed back to the dock and browsed the shops there. We found a little trinket to put in our entertainment center and also found a small ice cream stand. I took a look at the flavors and found something interesting, licorice ice cream. We decided to split a scoop and here it is:

 

It was very interesting and very good. There were bits of black licorice in with a vanilla ice cream. Just enough to give a good licorice flavor, but not enough to overpower the ice cream. After we finished our ice cream we walked back down the dock, got back on the ship and said goodbye to Copenhagen.

Next time I’ll tell you about the dinner we had on the ship that night and then we’re on to Berlin, Germany.

Until next time,

Mike

A Relaxing Day At Sea

After going non stop from Las Vegas to Philadelphia to Dublin to London to Dover and onto the ship, we finally had a day with nothing going on. As normal on a sea day, we slept in. I’m sure we had some sort of lunch on the Lido deck, but as I mentioned, I can’t describe them all.

Our first sea day was our first formal night in the dining room and that means one thing on a cruise, lobster night. Now I really don’t eat lobster that much, but Joan does. Before we get to that, we have all of our starter courses.

Each night at dinner they bring around the bread basket. My standard order each night is a baguette and a sourdough roll. Here they are on my bread plate:

 

 

Joan and I both started this evening with the Baked Stuffed Mushrooms. There are five small mushrooms served in round dish baked with spinach, romano cheese and herbs. Here’s what it looks like. Don’t worry, the mushrooms are under there.

 

We got different second starters. Joan’s was one of her favorites. She ordered Strawberry Bisque, which is a chilled strawberry soup with fresh mint. We have both said that it really tastes like melted strawberry ice cream. I didn’t get the “in progress” shot of this dish, but they basically put down a bowl with a small bit of strawberry in the center and then pour the soup in at the table. Once they’ve finished, here’s what you get:

 

For my second starter, I again went with one of the pasta main courses served as a starter. I went with the Spaghetti Carbonara. This is spaghetti in a cream sauce tossed with bacon and parmesan cheese. Here is the small starter serving:

 

Now we move on to the main courses. Joan, of course, got the lobster. It was a broiled Maine lobster tail that was served with three jumbo black tiger shrimp, mashed potatoes and broccoli. Here it is with a little ramekin of butter for dipping:

 

 

She liked the lobster so much, she had to ask for a second tail that was of course delivered promptly. I have heard of people ordering as many as eighteen lobster tails, but I have never personally seen more than three.

As for me, as I said, I don’t eat much lobster, so I went for the prime rib. It was served with a couple of onion rings and a baked potato that they topped with sour cream. The prime rib was cooked a wonderful medium rare. The meat itself wasn’t the top tier of beef (we’ll get to that later), but it was still very good. Here’s what I had:

 

 

That was all delicious, but we of course had just a little room left for dessert. One of the great things about the first formal night is the Cherries Jubilee. Smooth vanilla ice cream, which was made even better on this cruise because it was actually gelato, served with dark cherries and flamed in cherry brandy. Here’s what we got:

 

Next time we get to spend the day in Copenhagen, Denmark and find a couple great local foods, plus another dinner on the ship.

Until next time,

Mike

Cruise Day Is Here

After a couple wonderful days in Ireland and a day in England, it was finally time to board our cruise. We woke up in the morning, stepped onto the balcony of the room we had and this is what we saw:

That’s our ship, the Carnival Legend, docked just around the corner from our hotel. We packed up our three suitcases and headed to the one small elevator. Since most of the guests in our hotel were heading to the cruise ship at around the same time, there was a line to get into this small elevator and that was just on our floor. I’m assuming it was the same on the others. So, we dragged our luggage down to the stairs and carried each one down. We beat the first people in line down to the lobby.

As I said, there were a lot of the guests that were heading to the dock, so we put our name on the taxi list. We sat in the lobby next to a nice family from Chicago who we would see again on the cruise and waited for our room number to be called. In only 15 minutes or so a nice cab driver came in and found us and we were on our way to the dock. It was a flat five pound fare for the short drive to the dock. He dropped us off, we left our bags with the porter and we were in the terminal. We quickly made our way through the security screening and went to the check in lines. Now, since we are platinum guests, we get a VIP check in line. However, when we got there we noticed that the “VIP” line was actually longer than the regular check in lines, so we got in the regular line. The only thing that slowed us down the tiniest bit was that the check in person had to go to the VIP area to retrieve our sail and sign cards. That took all of three minutes and then we were heading for the ship. This was the 18^th time that I have boarded a Carnival cruise ship, but this had to be the most exciting one for me.

We were on the ship and, of course, the first place you head…. The “Welcome Aboard” lunch on the Lido Deck. Now we ate a bunch of food on the Lido Deck and if I described every meal here in this blog it would take a year to get through. But, I do have to mention the “Welcome Aboard” lunch. Not that the food is any better than any other time on the Lido, but it is the FIRST time you get to eat on the ship. I opted first for the grilled ham and cheese sandwich from the deli:

 

And then a quick plate from the buffet lines. It’s been awhile since I took this picture, but as I remember from looking, I had some roast beef, potatoes, some cole slaw, some noodles and beef from the Chinese station and some sort of pasta.

Finally a slice of caramel cheesecake from the dessert station:

 

After we finished the first of what will be many meals on the ship, we went to the dining room to find our table. We ended up with a nice little table for two just inside the entrance to the dining room. Before we sailed, I had made a quick post to John Heald’s Facebook page requesting a table for two and he did not disappoint. We then headed to our room and found it ready for us. Something new that Carnival is doing is expediting luggage delivery for VIP guests. For the first time, our luggage had arrived at our room before we did. I stepped out on our balcony and snapped a quick couple of pictures. In the first one you can see the White Cliffs of Dover that were just off the ship and the second is looking back at our hotel (to go with the picture above of the ship taken from the hotel):

 

After our quick safety drill, where they show us our muster station and how to put on our lifejackets if we need it (which I must admit is just a little more difficult that putting on your seatbelt on the airplane), we were ready to sail. As we sailed past the famed White Cliffs of Dover, I had to pull up the Eric Johnson song “Cliffs of Dover” and listen to as we passed.

Once we were underway, we checked out the ship a little more and then relaxed a bit in our cabin before heading off to the Truffles dining room for dinner. Now, a typical dinner for us on the ship consists of two starters (soups, salads, appetizers, etc.), a main course and a dessert. For this first night, I selected as one of my starters a main course item. One thing you should know about any Carnival main dining room is that most of the pasta main courses are available in a smaller “starter” size. That’s what I do quite often. So, this night I started my meal with Linguini with Italian Sausage, Bell Peppers and Mushrooms served with freshly grated parmesan cheese.

My second starter was off the “Every Day” menu and it was a simple Caesar Salad. It is nothing super special, but a great salad nonetheless.

 

For my main course, I really didn’t have that tough a decision. I decided on the Tender Braised Beef Brisket in Gravy that came with roasted vegetables and mashed potatoes. Here’s what I got:

 

Nice chunks of brisket with smooth potatoes. It was a very nice main course, but Joan with her meal got something that would make this even better. I quickly flagged down Renato our server (I’ll talk more about our team later) and asked if I could get one of the sides that came with Joan’s main course. He said “Of course” and in a couple minutes I had one of these as well:

 

Ooey, gooey macaroni and cheese. It was just a little ramekin of it, so it didn’t add too much. Just enough creamy cheese sauce and pasta to top off my brisket. Then it was on to dessert. The first night on a cruise is a difficult choice because they have two great desserts that are only available the first night, the crème brulee and the black forest gateau. I went back and forth and back and forth and then decided on the black forest gateau which is a chocolate cake filled with bing cherries, heavy cream and kirschwasser. Here’s what it looks like:

It was very good, but the crème brulee was also in my mind. I then remembered the words of my friend Scott who says about dinning on a cruise, “There’s no shame in doubling up.” So, here’s my crème brulee:

 

Joan and I shared this and so ended our first dinner on the ship. We have 11 more nights and plenty of ports to go.

Next time, our second dinner after a day at sea.

Until next time,

Mike

We Head to the United Kingdom

After finally finding the wonderful dessert we were looking for, we had a good night’s sleep and in the morning we were off to the airport for our flight from Dublin to London’s Heathrow airport. In the morning, we caught a taxi from the hotel to the airport and were treated to a typically Irish cab driver. I don’t remember his name but he was very nice and talked to us practically the whole way to the airport.

Once we got there it was a simple matter to check in and then we were waiting for our British Airways flight to London. This day was the only day of rain that we had the entire trip but it did cause a bit of delay in our flight leaving. Once we did get on the flight it was uneventful, just the way you’d like a flight to be.

Once we arrived in London, we met a driver that we had hired to drive us to Dover to meet the ship. It is about an hour and a half to two hour drive from London to Dover and since we didn’t want to rent a car (and learn how to drive on the left for one day) we hired a car service to drive us. We figured this was easier than trying to haul all of our luggage on a bus or train. Another reason we wanted our own car was so we could schedule a side stop. This stop would be at the second of our possible six Hard Rock Cafés. This was no ordinary Hard Rock. This was the Hard Rock Café London, the first Hard Rock Café. Here’s what we saw when we got there:

Across the street from the Café was the Rock Shop, where we were able to pick up our shot glass and pin. And outside that was a typical sight of London, a red phone booth:

Our driver was able to find a parking spot right on the street around the corner. We were in and out in 15 minutes and back in the car and on our way to Dover. It rained most of the way down there and I would be lying if I said that we didn’t doze off a couple of times. One other thing that I wanted to mention about the drive down comes from the “Things are the same everywhere” file. On the drive to Dover, our driver had a talk radio station on and there was a wonderful debate on the “unique” problem that they were having in the UK. Should they give immunity to illegal immigrants living in the UK? I told the driver that you could pick that debate up and put it on any radio station in the US and it would be exactly the same argument.

So, after our drive, we checked into the Best Western Dover Marina Hotel right on the waterfront. After we got settled in our room, we went back down to the desk to ask about places for dinner. Now you will notice on this food blog, there hasn’t been much discussion of food for the day. That’s because we had been sustaining ourselves on some trail mix and almonds we had stashed in our carry on bags and some drinks from the airport. Now we needed dinner. The desk clerk gave us some ideas and we decided to walk below the underpass and into the city centre for dinner. We walked up and down a bit and checked out a couple of places.

We settled on this little casual place called illy. Now I had seen the illy logo before and they are known for their coffee over here in the US. In the UK they have a line of casual restaurants and here’s the one in Dover:

After perusing the menu, I settled on an English Beef Roast dinner. It was roast beef served with vegetables, potatoes and a Yorkshire pudding. Again, like most “puddings” on this trip, Yorkshire pudding is not what we Americans would call pudding. Yorkshire pudding is more of a batter pudding made with meat drippings that resembles a biscuit. Here’s my plate with the Yorkshire pudding right in the front:

Joan ended up getting a chicken and mushroom pie with a salad and chips (or French fries). Here’s what she got:

After we finished our dinner, we needed some dessert. They had a couple of options there at illy, however we had another plan. While we were walking around the streets of Dover, my wonderful wife Joan had a very keen eye. We were just checking out the dinner menu at a place called Blakes of Dover when she spotted the dessert menu and saw…. Sticky Toffee Pudding.

So we headed back around the corner and found this place again:

We headed in and ordered our Sticky Toffee Pudding that was served with custard again. This time, we decided to order only one and split it. Here’s what we got:

I can’t say it was better than the one we got at Bruxelle’s in Dublin but it was close. The custard itself was maybe a bit better in Dublin, but we thought the cake was a bit better here. In all, neither one was a mistake to order. If I was in either place again I would get them again in a heartbeat.

Blakes of Dover was a small place like many we had been in, with a small bar in the basement. This was just like going to someone’s rec room in their basement to have a drink. While we were using the restroom before we left, I struck up a conversation with the couple people that were at the bar. They were obviously “regulars” and were very nice. One even had their dog with them and anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a dog person.

After we left, we took a walk around Dover and caught a glimpse of the White Cliffs of Dover. I’ll get to more of that in the next post. We headed back to the hotel and began preparing for our cruise on the Carnival Legend.

Next time, we depart Dover and get our first dinner on the ship.

Until next time,

Mike

Still Looking For Our Dessert

After a full day of riding the hop on, hop off bus around Dublin, seeing some amazing sites and driving past both the Guinness Storehouse and the Jameson Distillery, we needed some dinner. We knew we wanted something traditionally Irish but had no idea where to go. We asked the concierge at the hotel if they had any suggestions and said that we were specifically looking for Sticky Toffee Pudding. They had some menus there and we couldn’t find it anywhere. One restaurant called the Pig’s Ear had something called Bread and Butter Pudding and the concierge said that their food was very good so he made us a reservation there. We were disappointed that we couldn’t find the dessert we were looking for so much but we were looking forward to the traditional Irish food.

After freshening up for a bit we took the short walk down Grafton Street (past the McDonald’s) and around the corner right across from Trinity College. We found this little door off the street:

This was just the entrance with the rest of the restaurant on the floors above. We ate in the “Main Restaurant” which was on the first floor. We found a lot of places in Europe that the “first floor” is what we would call the second floor. What we would call the first floor they call the ground floor. Here is a map of the restaurant that was hanging just inside the door:

We got a nice little table right on the window so we could look down on the street below. Like many of the places that we visited in Europe, this was a small dining room of maybe seven or eight tables. Once we ordered, they brought us some Irish soda bread in this neat little burlap bag:

As for our main courses, I had not had a Shepherd’s Pie since we had been in Ireland so I ordered one made with lamb and Joan got a salmon dish. Here’s what we ended up with:

We also got a side dish of potatoes cooked in duck fat. Here they are:

The food and the service were very good. As you can see, the Shepherd’s Pie came in its own little cast iron dish and it held the heat in perfectly. As we were waiting for our food, though, we were a little disappointed that we couldn’t find our Sticky Toffee Pudding. I had one more idea. While we were waiting I pulled up an app on my iPhone called “Foodspotting” and typed in “Sticky Toffee Pudding.” It pulled up a number of places that were hundreds of miles away…. And one that was just around the block!

I pulled up their website and found that they stopped serving food at this pub at 9:00. It was already 8:00. It was going to be close, but we thought we could make it. We finished our dinner and quickly got the check. We walked back toward the hotel and down Grafton Street to Harry Street and came across Bruxelle’s

We sat down in the bar area around 8:45 so we had just made it. Our server came over and said that the kitchen was about to close so if we wanted food we would have to order quickly. We said that was just fine with us because we only wanted dessert and we knew what we wanted. We wanted the Sticky Toffee Pudding. She said it was available with cream, ice cream or custard. Well we knew about ice cream so we decided that we would each get one, mine with custard and Joan’s with cream. We probably should have shared but what the heck we’d each get our own.

Now I have been discussing Sticky Toffee Pudding but have not really described it. Like most “puddings” on this trip, Sticky Toffee Pudding is not what you would think of as pudding. Sticky Toffee Pudding is a sponge cake made with dates and covered with a toffee sauce. The ones at Bruxelle’s are then served with cream and a custard and let me tell you it was one of the best things we ate all trip.

Here’s what they looked like. First, mine with the custard:

and Joan’s with the cream:

The custard was smooth and creamy and the cake was so moist. It took us a long while to find but it was well worth the wait. We will definitely be looking for this on menus here is the US and sampling it whenever we can.

By this time we were thoroughly stuffed. We made our way back to the hotel and packed up what little we had unpacked and got ready for our trip to London.

Next time we make a stop at the Hard Rock in London and dinner in Dover before we get on the ship.

Until next time,

Mike