Good Bye Celebrity Mercury

It has been a great good five month on the Celebrity Mercury, I enjoyed every moment here and now I am sad to leave her.....and he leaving Celebrity. The beautiful Mercury will go in Dry Dock and then operate as Mein Schiff 2 for TUI, a German operator, and our sister company.

Most of us have been on Mercury for several month now and the team work is amazing, our ratings are getting better and better and if I watch the cooks on the line every night, I can see that there is a great team at work. We just have one more cruise left, and the rest of this one and then we all will part, sadly and either go on vacation (like me) or they are transferred to another ship. I know that I will be meeting up with a lot of friends again in the future as we are all in this big pool of worker bees going around from ship to ship.

In the past good 5 month I have travelled all the way from Alaska down the West Coast to San Francisco, then further south through the Panama Canal and now have been for some time in the Caribbean. I have seen a lot, tasted many new dishes and met many interesting people and new friends.

We had a lot of fun in the galley, something that is very important for me. No I am not the shouter, I don't want to have a heart attack before I turn 50, yes we all have to work hard, but there has to be some fun in it as well.

We are 107 Chefs in the Galleys of the beautiful Mercury, producing close to 10'000 Meals per day. This is a lot of food we use every single day, but even with these huge amounts, still everything gets made from scratch, the stocks, the sauces, the soups, just simply everything. That is maybe why it is so much fun working here.

During the time here there were many great moments, one of them was when we implemented our healthy Mess for the Crew, it was actually decided by the crew that they want to eat healthier so we made a new menu and then after one month had to change the location, we have 4 crew restaurants and the healthy mess was the smallest one, now it is the second biggest location, we just swapped 2 messes around, that is what I call success.

Of course we had a great Christmas, there is a lovely Blog about the buffet we made and just now we had Super Bowl, what an event, we had 2 buffets in the Theatre, one in the Night Club and one in the Casino, all at the same time with our dinner time in the Main Dining Room, so we were running around like.... But it was a great success after all.

Now on this last cruise we are lucky that we can spoil Crew and Guest alike as we usually need to have a certain amount of money in the thawing cycle for next cruise, but as we have no thawing cycle at the end of the cruise, we could use that money, so we had some great parties and a big crew brunch in the main dining room.

Of course towards the end it got a little chaotic with the hand over and imagine first day back in Baltimore over 300 Crew signed off for either vacation or a holiday, on the second day in Baltimore another 400 signed off and then we were the last ones to go, a bunch of about 100 going home February 28. During this time everybody from Tui came and started getting the ship ready for dry dock where she will be renovated and then sails under TUI's flag as "Mein Schiff 2"

Good luck beautiful Mercury, it was a real pleasure to sail on you, Thank you so much.

I am soon on my way to South Africa and I can promise you all that there will be many blogs wit loads of recipes, I have already started a list of dishes I want to make, most of them easy to cook, but delicious to eat, see you all soon!!!