July 4 2009

Once upon a time I thought it would be a great idea to roast a pig for a party. Pigs are big, so you need a big party. My neighbor Oscar throws a pig party every year for Independence Day so I just needed to figure out how to pull it off. Well, I researched for a while and after some fits and starts I found these 3 guys from miami with some instructions. So here is what happened. Oscar let me tear up a 5x9 foot section of his yard and we built the roaster out of 48 concrete blocks.

We dumped in a full bag of charcoal and lit it up. Once the coals were hot we used a long handle shovel to push the coals to the four corners for indirect heating. We added another bag of coals equally distributed amongst the four piles. The it was time to add the pig. A few weeks earlier, my dad and I had built grill grates out of rebar. The day before, ohcaptain and I picked up the pig from the butcher shoppe, brought it home and applied my double secret pork dry rub(note the spices in the cavity, note our messy hands). I had originally named the pig Wilbur. Wilbur came prepped and ready to go, we did have to rem00ve the kidneys. Lisa (my wife) cut the kidneys into bite size chunks and gave the dogs a treat (*shudder*). I also discovered that Wilbur was going to have a name change. Turns out Wilbur is a girl (note the USDA tramp stamps). Well we got her seasoned up and stuffed her back into the big plastic bag she came in. How do you keep 80 pounds of swine from spoiling over night? Well the refrigerator is much to small. Of course!!! Dump her in the bathtub and pack it with ice. It worked great, but the kids were a little freaked out so we hung a blanket over the shower curtain rod to hide the piggy.

Back to the day of the party. We had to get Betsy over to Oscars house where we built the grill. Well, Betsy was a big gal and we had a couple hundred yards to go, so we wired her to the rebar grills and loaded her onto the trailer.

He had the coals going so we placed Betsy on the roaster and covered her with sheets of aluminum foil. We covered all that with large hempish area rug that Tom's wife was going to throw away, and she c00ked marvellously for 4.5 hrs. I bought myself a remote f00d thermometer for father's day this year. It worked great and Betsy turned out great. Its a bit of a hassle to break down an entire pig into bite size pieces for a party, but it was worth it in the end. It turns out that the very best meat comes from the upper portion of each leg. Wow was that g00d. As you can see, there is an unwritten rule that when you roast a pig you are required to where an ugly shirt. 80 lbs of pork goes a long way. There was plenty eaten, and plenty leftover. Everybody loved it and we plan on doing it again next year. After we ate our fill and the sun went down. We kicked back and started blowing stuff up. Independence Day at Oscar's house is a blast!!