Today would have been the day we disembarked in New York from a five-day Bermuda cruise with a big group of line dancers — including a shore-day meetup dance with a group on Bermuda.
Instead, we made the best of it and took a pretend voyage, starting with a Virtual Sail-Away Party (via Zoom) on Wednesday.
While “onboard”, we’ve had numerous gourmet meals and cocktail hours.
Lucky for us, our fantasy vacation coincided with “Digital Dance Weekend 3” – a three-day, virtual event with choreographers and line dancers from all over the world. It even came complete with a costume party, a staff talent show, and a formal night (today) — just as we would have had on board the ship!
The weather on our ship days wasn’t actually all that great, so we started to feel a tiny bit cooped up. Yesterday, we made sure we got out on the Promenade Deck for a good walk in the fresh air and sunshine!
Dessert after dinner one night was Tropical Coconut Pudding.
This was pantry cooking at its finest: we found a box of instant coconut pudding mix waaaay in the back of a high cupboard. Inspiration! Mixed with a can of coconut milk (also on hand) and a large splash of Captain Morgan (yes, also on hand) and topped with toasted coconut (yes, really, also on hand), it was worthy of a cruise-ship dessert display.
We’re having so much fun posting about our virtual vacation on Facebook, we’re actually glad the mayor of New York City is not going to allow us to disembark today.
We’ll have one more full day of shipboard meals, including tonight’s formal dinner of steak and lobster (both from the freezer) and more line dancing before it’s back to reality for us tomorrow.
Our next fantasy vacation will be to a health spa!
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(Berkley, 2016)
Of course, I had to have some cruise ship reading! Title Wave by Lorna Barrett is #10 in the author’s Booktown Mystery series. I haven’t read the others; there are a few potential plot spoilers for earlier books if you have a good memory (which I don’t), but this one was fine to read on its own.
Title Wave is set on a ship, where the amateur detective main character, bookstore owner Tricia Miles is taking a Mystery Author Cruise to Bermuda with her sister Angelica and others from their small town of Stoneham, New Hampshire. (Where so many murders have happened since Tricia moved in, she’s gotten a reputation as a village jinx.)
With Title Wave being a bookish cozy mystery, not a culinary one — and with Tricia sticking to her abstemious diet for the first several days of her first-ever cruise — there aren’t as many descriptions of the delectable food and drink prepared by the shipboard head chef and galley crew as you might expect. But there are enough to whet your appetite as you read, and there are even a few recipes included at the end.
“As they inched forward, Tricia looked over the food, including more than a dozen vegetable side dishes. She sized them up while Angelica dove straight into the protein, heaping samples of shrimp, chicken, and beef onto her tray. Tricia chose a tablespoon or two of various cooked vegetables.
From Title Wave by Lorna Barrett
‘Is that all you’re going to have? I thought you said you were starving.’
‘I’m still considering my options. There’s a salad bar just across the way,’ Tricia pointed out.
‘This is a vacation. You’re supposed to pig out,’ Angelica said, exasperated.
‘That’s not my style, and you know it,’ Tricia said.”
Title Wave isn’t for anyone looking for elegant writing, but it’s a good one to throw in your suitcase for cruise-ship reading! Although part of a series, it can be read on its own. The characters had enough backstory revealed to pique my interest in reading more about the residents and Tricia’s past and future murder investigations in the not-so-sleepy little town of Stoneham, aka Booktown. Tricia works out some of her issues related to past drama with family and food while on board, too!
Read an excerpt from Title Wave by Lorna Barrett.
Happy Weekend Cooking!
This post is shared to Weekend Cooking, a weekly feature hosted by Beth Fish Reads.