Meat Salad

I love food and I love to eat. When working at sea I love how incredibly hungry I become in a few hours, that the food is free and prepared
thrice a day without dishes or groceries or leftovers to worry about. Furthermore depending how one looks at it, the more you eat the more you
get paid. Lately though my love of food has extended to cold cereal and noodles in a cup far too often. That's because despite the Steward's
friendly personality and nearly thirty years of professional belly rubbing his skills at keeping the crew fat are limited.

Yesterday really astounded me when we not only had ham and bacon for breakfast but sausage patties, sausage links cut in half, sliced
kielbasa and the left over hot dogs from lunch the day before! Who the hell wants six choices of meat at breakfast? Add to this the same food
he's put out for the last forty days; pancakes, grits, scrambled eggs and a bowel of oatmeal he need not renew since he just keeps adding
water day after day after day and you see where I'm going with this.

I suppose I take it a little personally that he really thinks I or anyone else wants the same breakfast day in and day out and that we like
having a meat buffet to choose from. Unfortunately for me, my schedule means this is my lunch and what I wouldn't do for some French toast or a
quiche. Instead I get creative and peel hard-boiled eggs, remove the yolk and put it in between two pieces of rye bread and call it a chicken
burger or cut up a pepper and tomato, toss it in a bowel of grits with home fries and call it pot pie.

I can't tell you how great it is to have a good steward with real culinary skills. It keeps up morale and allows you to eat healthy.
Almost everything we've been served is fried and despite the impending new medical standards the company hasn't gotten the memo about trans
saturated fat fryer oil being bad for the arteries. How I miss the steward that did egg white omelets or cooked a new pot of oatmeal
everyday. The best food I ever had at sea was on a sailboat with a wood-burning stove where the cook was paid a tenth of what this fellow
makes and worked that many times as hard. If only the steward had to spend as much time in vacation based training as the rest of us.