Celebrity Guest Chefs

We had a star-studded weekend with appearances from various local, self-made South Pole Celebrities.

On Saturday, it was Galley Appreciation Day where the kitchen crew got the day off as a thank you for the many overtime hours it took them to execute the fine Sunset Dinner. In their place, members of the community rallied together and made breakfast, lunch and dinner, hence Celebrity Guest Chef Day. I was on the dinner crew and it was pizza night!

Among the Celebrity Guest Chefs, we had our Station Manager Katie, electrician Jared and engineer Weeks cranking out the pizzas. It’s a sanitation requirement whenever in the kitchen to have your head covered…but it’s not specified as to what kind of hat it should be.

Unlike Michael, we used pre-made crusts instead of homemade dough. At first we grabbed some frozen crusts from the deck outside but the boxes must have been sitting in the Dome too long (i.e. years and years too long) as the crusts had an unpalatable fuel smell to them. Katie and Weeks made an emergency trip back to the Dome and found “fresher” boxes that didn’t smell like fuel and then we were able to assemble the pizzas in time for dinner.

Dinner was a success (or at least we didn’t hear any complaints) and Polies partied into the night long after I went to bed. Unfortunately, I left my camera sitting in the Galley and found these photos on it later:

..self-portraits by Weeks...

...and the late night musical act of Deb in her dragon costume (which she wore for her wedding a year ago) and Todd playing an accordion duet. I really need to remember to NOT leave my camera sitting around.

Then on Sunday evening, I hosted a wine tasting event, again using Celebrity Guest Chefs who made wonderful appetizers that were paired to different wines. We had more than half the station population turn out for the food and vino but what I didn’t anticipate was that some of the tasters would also turn out to be celebrities themselves.

Our equipment operator Josiah turned into Rambo, construction manager Kevin a cowboy swigging beer and whiskey at the wine tasting, Kiwi Paul as a Studio 54 cokehead and Nathan as Austin Powers. Not only do we have accordions down here, we also have a ridiculously large collection of wigs. Everyone had a great time enjoying some outstanding culinary creations that were nicely paired with a white or red wine or port. Typically wine tastings tend to be fancy, reserved events. At ours, we had an attempted scalping but there were no injuries, just a few hangovers on Monday morning.

And early on Tuesday morning, April Fools Day, I stumbled into the restroom half asleep with bleary eyes only to find all of the stalls locked but seemingly occupied by abandoned boots.

I'm just waiting for those blasted ping pong balls to show up again somewhere today.