Kathy & I have always enjoyed the fact that much of the food on cruise ships is actually made on board. Most of the breads, sauces, ice cream & gelato are made on board. Some of the pasta is also made in-house, but generally only in the specialty restaurants. The sheer volume of pasta needed to serve hundreds or thousands of dishes does not lend itself to in-house preparation.

Celebrity cruise ships have a specialty restaurant called Tuscan Grille, which is essentially an Italian-themed steakhouse. It’s a long way from Tuscany, but is appropriately decorated, and a lot of the menu items are Tuscany influenced. We especially look forward to the artisan breads, yummy olive oil and aged balsamic vinegars. And the cheese! Sigh…. There is nothing like the peppery taste of a good olive oil. And while you can’t get Pici Pasta there, what they do make in house is pretty darned good!

The same morning as our sushi making demonstration, there was a pasta making demonstration. They were timed so that we could easily leave one and go to the next, getting there in plenty of time for a front row seat. And there was no plexiglass to blur our view and cause reflections, so I was able to get some pretty decent photos.

Chef Michael walked us through a very basic pasta dough recipe, then handed the dough off to his assistant Glenn, to run it through the fancy, $30,000 German pasta machine, pressing out spaghetti and rigatoni. Just a little more robust than a home pasta maker! Once again, we were not able to sample the output, but as it turned out we were scheduled to have dinner there that evening, so we made a point of trying out several of the pasta offerings. They were quite good!

For anyone who didn’t get the musical reference in the title:

One of the things we love about sea days on a cruise is there are often educational – or at least entertaining – activities scheduled throughout the day. Sometimes they take the form of a guest lecturer, a Q&A with the captain and officers, or cooking demonstrations. The first one we attended was a sushi making demonstration in the ship’s sushi restaurant, Sushi On 5. So called because it is on, you guessed it, Deck 5. It used to also cost $5, but inflation…that was a while ago. It is now an ala carte specialty restaurant, which we don’t mind paying extra for because we like sushi.

Kathy & I are by no means experts, but we have come to enjoy sushi in its various forms. We enjoyed listening to Raymond, one of the waiters and the manager of the restaurant, explaining to a skeptical couple that sushi does not necessarily mean ‘raw fish,’ that the term actually refers to the style of rice used in sushi cuisine. And of course some dishes served at sushi restaurants do not even contain rice, such as sashimi.

Sushi chef John took us through the process of preparing the various ingredients for his dishes, including a shrimp roll, nigiri, sashimi and a custom dish, the name of I’ve forgotten but it looks like an ice cream cone with fish. I asked him about his knives, which he explained were hard Japanese steel, and that he spends an hour every morning sharpening them in order to cut the fish smoothly and cleanly. They sure looked sharp to me!

We didn’t get to taste the samples, but we had already eaten lunch there and we returned one evening for dinner, both of which we enjoyed very much. Raymond walked us through the menu and made some excellent suggestions for dishes that we enjoyed.

It was an interesting and educational experience, and one of the many reasons we love sea days!