Tag: dining

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Cruises Are More Fun That You’d Think

When you think of cruise holidays, what do you think of? One too many blue rinses? Families of chavs dive bombing the swimming pool every five seconds? You wouldn’t be alone in thinking this, but in reality cruise holidays are a lot of fun and today we will provide you with seven wonderful reasons why.

1. Food glorious food. Holidays, my friend, are for eating, and if you opt for a cruise you will be surprised by the quality and sheer amount of food on offer. Breakfast buffets piled high with croissants, fresh fruit, yoghurt, not to mention the wonder that is the ‘omelette station’ – and that’s just breakfast! Try and save room for the evening’s fine dining – the food served of an evening on certain cruise ships can rival even the fanciest Michelin star restaurants. Dine on salads before you go, because we guarantee that you’ll still be able to wear anything that doesn’t have an elasticated waistband by the end of your trip!

2. A chance to be fancy. On what other type of holiday do you have the chance to don your finest glad-rags each and every evening? Exactly. One of the best things about cruise holidays is just how formal the evenings are – fine food, wine and company teamed with an excuse to wear that ball gown that’s been hanging in the back of your closet for years.

3. Everything is within your reach. Nowadays cruise ships have every activity that you could possibly want to try, all on one gigantic floating city. Whether you fancy a spot of golf, trying your hand on the surf simulator or scrambling up the climbing wall – you won’t have to venture far from your cabin to do it. For those of you who don’t like anything this active, there will be swimming pools and sunbeds galore (no matter how many Germans are on your ship to get there before you!) and you can also while away a few hours in the on-board library or cinema. There is something for everyone.

4. Avoid the perils of packing and unpacking. No-one enjoys cramming all of their holidays essentials into one tiny bag and jamming it shut via the use of all of your body weight! This is a task that should be repeated only once or twice per trip max. The joy of a cruise is that although you are visiting multiple destinations – you only have to unpack once! Splendid.

5. See multiple places. Admit it – airports are annoying! Cruises eradicate the need to face stern-faced security officials menacingly telling you to remove your belt, and that’s before we even get on to the horror of aeroplane food! Phew. On a cruise you can literally wake up in a different place every day without the hassle that comes with getting yourself there.

6. Superb service. Let’s be honest, the service that you experience in that Costa del Sol all-inclusive hotel is, more often than not, more Faulty Towers than First Class! Not so upon a cruise ship. The staff are typically interesting folk who have seen the world, and the performers wouldn’t be out of place on the West End stage.

7. Booze is included. If you want to start the day with a Bloody Mary, casually move into late morning Pimms, afternoon Champagne and evening cocktails – you can do so! Just try to avoid drunken walks on the deck!

April 26, 2013
7 Reasons Not To Have A Bat In Your Dining Room

This may come as something of a surprise to regular readers of 7 Reasons, but we’re not experts on everything that we write about. Often, our pieces contain much speculation and conjecture. Today’s piece, however, is different. Today’s piece is written from experience. If you should find yourself in a dining room with a bat, this is exactly how it will go down.

1. Surprise! As you sit in your dining room on a quiet Saturday night catching up on missed television programmes using the iPlayer, you’ll feel relaxed and at ease. You’ll take a sip of your drink and languidly stretch out your legs. You’ll stifle a yawn and stretch out your arms. Eventually, you’ll lean back in your seat and glance up toward the ceiling light, to ascertain what is casting the strange shadow that you have seen from the corner of your eye for the past few seconds. Then you’ll scream involuntarily and bolt from the room and slam the door shut behind you. A large bat flying around your dining room will come as something of a surprise to you.

2. Disbelief. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Your wife will enquire in a startled manner, somewhat surprised by your shrieking.

“There’s a bat in the dining room.”

“What?”

“There’s a bat in the dining room.”

“What?”

“Bat!” (You’ll flap your arms about miming flight at this point). “Dining room!” (You’ll also point at the dining room.)

“What’s it doing in there?”

“Flying around the ceiling lamp and watching a documentary about Stalin.”

Rather disbelievingly, your wife will go to the dining room, open the door slightly and peer through the gap. On closing it very quickly, she will then announce that “there’s a bat in the dining room”.

3. Spin. Anxious that you should always see the positive side of any situation, you’ll start brainstorming. A bat in the dining room could be a good thing, you’ll think. A bat in the dining room would mean that there would never be any insects in there. A bat in the dining room would ensure that you could write in there with absolutely no chance of interruption: You could look at the internet with no chance of interruption! A bat in the dining room would…be a bloody great bat in the dining room. It turns out that the elephant in the room is that there’s a bat in the room. There’s no upside so good that it can surmount the fact that your dining room contains a bat.

4. Whimsy. Having established that having a bat in the dining room is a bad thing, you’ll turn your mind to what the hell to do with it. “We could call the RSPCA”, your wife will suggest.

“We’re not being cruel to it. We’re being inconvenienced by it.”

“Perhaps there’s a local bat group.”

“Yes, maybe they could send some sort of bat man.”

“A dog warden?”

“Or, we could call Commissioner Gordon and he could raise the bat-signal. Perhaps we could…”

5. Motivation. “…Oh my god!”

“What?!”

“My gin and tonic’s in there!”

6. De-batting. “Darling”, you’ll say, “We’re just going to have to man-up and deal with the bat ourselves…In you go.” This motivational speech will fail to make her deal with the bat on your behalf, so you’ll have to work as a team. You will close every door in the house (so the bat can’t start terrorising you in other rooms) and your wife will peer back into the dining room. She will find that the bat is still flying around in there, fluttering in haphazard circles around the ceiling light like a terrifying and gigantic moth. A behemoth*. You’ll formulate a plan. You will run in, raise the blind, open the window and run out again: Your wife will be in charge of opening and closing the door. You’ll take a deep breath and steel yourself for the task. Eventually, though too soon for you, your wife will open the door and you will burst into the room and stride toward the blind. Startled by the sudden presence in the room, the bat will realise that flying around is not a safe thing to do and he will decide to land. At the very instant that you arrive at the blind, the bat will land on it, inches from your face. “Aaaarrrgghhh”, you’ll scream as you run out of the room. Your wife will close the door.

You’ll realise that another plan is called for. If you raise the blind with the bat on it, you’ll just squash the bat. You’ll have a flat bat. And bats, if you flatten them, appear bigger. So, if you can’t raise the blind and open the window, you’ll have to trap the bat and remove it. Having rummaged in the kitchen cupboard for a suitable container for a considerable time, your wife will emerge with her Tupperware bat-trap. This time, she will be in charge of trapping the bat, and you will be in charge of the door (yay!) and the lid (boo!). You’ll open the door and your wife will stride in and head toward the blind with the container held out in front of her. Arriving at the blind she’ll cover the bat with the container. Now that the bat is safely contained, you’ll enter the room clutching the lid. You’ll slide the lid slowly and carefully between the blind and the Tupperware box and affix it. Phew.

7. Post-bat. As you breathe your sigh of relief the bat will let out a heart-rending squeak. Your wife will head into the back garden to release the bat and you’ll be in charge of the back door (yay again!). The moment that the lid is removed, the bat will flutter out and your wife will scream and run toward the door, which will cause you to laugh. Briefly. Eventually, having congratulated your wife on her brave conduct in the face of a big, scary bat and having closed every window in the house (twice), you’ll return to the comfort and security of Josef Stalin and your gin and tonic. Then you’ll discover that the bat has left you a “present” on your white Verner Panton stackable chair.

So there you go. That’s roughly what will happen if you have a bat in your dining room. I don’t recommend it.

*You’ll be inordinately proud of that wordplay.

July 26, 2011
It’s That SPAM Again

It’s Sunday today, so we’ve taken our traditional day away from the reasoning-mine and, as they are often wont to do, our thoughts have turned to food. Now, some time back we brought you what we considered to be the ultimate SPAM recipe – Planked SPAM – but now we’ve unearthed something that has easily trumped Planked SPAM and knocked it into a cocked hat. Whatever that means. Brace yourself! It’s…

Yes, it’s SPAM ‘n’ Beans which is, apparently, exactly right for Saturday night (which is rather a shame as I took my wife for cocktails and to a really good concert in Northern Europe’s largest Gothic Cathedral last night (if only I’d seen this first)). It seems delightfully simple to cook, consisting as it does of two ingredients; SPAM and baked beans. Simply place slices of SPAM in baked beans and cook them on the hob, then serve in some sort of dirty brown pot with congealed sauce oozing over the side. Who wouldn’t be overjoyed to be served this? It seems that the simplest recipes are often the most delicious.*

*Sadly I’m the member of the 7 Reasons team that doesn’t eat meat and – as SPAM is a distant relative of meat – I can’t try it myself. Any readers care to give it a go?**

**7 Reasons will be back tomorrow, without any tummy trouble whatsoever.

May 8, 2011
Russian Roulette Sunday: A Recipe

It’s Russian Roulette Sunday again (and ordinary Sunday too) and we’ve realised something: We’ve never given our readers a recipe before. We’ve requested them when under pressure; we’ve offered general lifestyle advice on how to do food correctly; and on how food should be consumed, but we’ve never been specific about how to prepare it. Until now.

This isn’t our own recipe, it’s one that we stumbled across on the internet while doing something else. But it’s safe to say that we were amazed by it. Flabbergasted. Dumbfounded. It’s a perfectly genuine recipe that features in an advert for the main ingredient and we haven’t in any way made it up.

In the past, we may have created and altered posters and passed them off as genuine, but we did that because we didn’t think that anyone would believe us, and we certainly didn’t imagine that thousands of people around the world would download those posters, presumably to use in essays and school projects. In fact, we feel fairly confident that, as World War II recedes further into history, and internet content becomes ever-more readily-accepted, those posters will come to be seen as genuine, and we – in our usual hapless manner – will have inadvertently caused a revision of history. We’re actually dreading the day that one of our posters turns up in a newspaper, or a book. Anyway, we’ve learned our lesson, and this poster is categorically not one of our creations.

You’re probably feeling a little peckish by now so, Ladies and Gentlemen, discerning readers of 7 Reasons (.org), we present to you, without any further ado…Planked SPAM.

Now, to some people, a meal consisting of SPAM on a plank might seem a little unconventional or unappetising, but rest assured: When you unveil this culinary master-stroke with a flourish, it will be “…greeted with cheers” by your jubilant dinner-guests. The advert says so, so it must be true. We’re not sure what wood the plank should be made from, though pine would probably be nice and fragrant, and less tough than oak. But you can experiment with your own planks, we wouldn’t want to ruin the fun. Let us know how you get on.

September 26, 2010
7 Reasons Not to Have a Dinner Party

1. The bad-egg. At any dinner party, at least one person will behave badly and annoy all of the other guests. It’s always a man. Often it’s me.

2. Multi-tasking. Women can multi-task – they demonstrate this by talking during films. This means that they approach both hosting and cooking for a dinner party with confidence, which makes it all the more tragic when your tearful hostess returns from the kitchen bearing a foul-smelling tray containing something black (possibly the charred remains of a flan) and a bowl of something green and unidentifiable (no idea). If you want to see a grown-woman cry, you don’t have to go to a dinner party. You can just hide her chocolate – which is a lot easier.

3. Candles. There are always candles on the table at dinner parties but no one knows why. I don’t want to singe my arm hair every time I pour some wine or pass the salt. Why would you want to put a fire on the table?

4. Wine. Guests always bring wine with them, and it’s always the wrong one – a Barolo when the main course is a delicate fish dish, or a New Zealand sauvignon blanc to go with lamb. Why can’t guests just do something useful and bring dessert with them? Or not come?

5. Cheesecake. A plain, unadorned cheesecake is one of the best desserts ever. I don’t want cheesecake made with Baileys, I don’t want cheesecake made with fruit, nor do I want cheesecake made with chocolate. What I would like is cheesecake made with cheese. And cake. Don’t tell me that I’m getting a cheesecake for dessert and then bring me something made with gooseberries and covered in sauce! Why can no one hosting a dinner party resist cocking up a cheesecake? Is it the law?

6. Children. I was brought up in a house that often hosted dinner parties – at least one a month – but I don’t think that my siblings or I even caught sight of one until we were eighteen years old. No one has ever successfully explained why children are banished from dinner parties to me. Is it because of the candles?

7. Restaurants. There are places where a group of people can sit around a table and eat wonderful food – made to a higher standard than they could manage themselves – they’re called restaurants. The diners don’t have to get up to fetch courses, drinks or cutlery and they don’t end up with candle-wax on their carpet. You can choose what you want to eat and drink rather than have your courses compromised by your friends bizarre and varied dietary requirements, children don’t have to be hidden – they can be taken with you or looked after by a babysitter – and you don’t have to wash-up afterwards. I sincerely hope they catch on.

March 15, 2010