Greetings from Trans-Siberia

You can’t begin to imagine how mysterious and exotic the East is, especially as represented to fat Europeans aboard an Italian-owned cruise ship.  Today, for example, we had real Filipino food served up by real Filipinos.  By coincidence we are sailing in the Philippine Sea and it’s raining outside the awning we are eating under on the stern of the tenth floor.  it’s crowded inside.  I just can’t wait to get home and try out recipes for day-old pancit and Filipino stewed best-value zucchini with Oscar Mayer Porkette Slices.

Maybe we should have gone to the sit-down place on the 8th floor.  These are the primary choices for food on the boat, outside of the pizza place.

The pizza was OK I guess.  A thin crust which some people like but I like less.  It wasn’t microwaved.  They have a real oven.  The pizza may or may not have been assembled in China last year; the mushrooms and ham were not of the best quality to begin with and a stint in the freezer may have made them as bad as they were when served.  Also, the pizza wasn’t cut.  This is an Italian ship, but they shop in a Chinese port.

There is a certain art to eating at Denny’s.  Not everything is uniformly bad.  You need to choose the substances which suffer the least from being frozen and canned.  Soups, stews, curries.  Red meat and chicken instead of fish: except perhaps salt cod and fish balls, fish can’t take getting old.  I would say fruits with substantial peels; but just this lunch I had a papaya which I saw the guy peeling and it still tasted like dorm refrigerator.  It must have had a big hidden moldy spot.

As long as we are talking about fruit, pick fruits that have a long shelf life, flavor-wise.  I find bananas quite palatable both green and brown, and pineapples can even start to ferment a little and still be interesting.

You have to stay away from any complicated preparations.  Even a thing that might seem simple, like a breaded fish; remember that the fish itself was sliced and breaded on a giant factory ship in the South Atlantic last year and since then it has been batted about on forklifts and left standing on docks in the sun.