Hawg Roast 2006

We tried and we succeeded!!! A grand time was had by the 30 or so adults (and a gaggle of children) in attendance. 104 pound Becky Sue was lowered into a hot pit of coals close to midnight last Friday. We were eating her up around 6pm Saturday. Wow. Justin learned a lot about hawg roasting prior to the event and learned even more throughout it. Here's pretty much what went on.

Dig hole with Allen's backhoe. (insert Tim the Toolman grunt here) and place rocks in the bottom.

Add fire.

Wait for fire to become hot coals.

On a table, lay out a piece of chicken wire big enough to wrap around the whole hawg. Lay banana leaves on that. Reverently place hawg on top of banana leaves belly side up. Season hawg with rock salt and pepper, shove onions, garlic, and apples into belly cavity. Sew up the cavity.

Wrap chicken wire around hawg. Tie chicken wire encased hawg onto long metal pipe.

Move hawg to the pit and set down so the hawg dangles above the coals and the pipe rests on the ground on two sides of the hole.

Cover with metal roofing. Cover roofing with dirt.

Wait.

Periodically check the temperature of both the hawg and the pit.

When hawg temperature reaches 150 or so (remember trichinosis is very very bad) remove hawg and let dangle in it's chicken wire home for one hour.

Lay hawg on table and unwrap. It's just like Christmas! Pull that pork and eat!!

Continue eating BBQ pork sandwiches for many many days following the event.

What was even better than the food? The friends! We had friends from the neighborhood, from work, and from just about everywhere.

Now let's see if I can figure out how to add pictures of this event. Wish me luck!

Grrrrr......this whole posting pictures thing isn't working as well as I'd planned. Wonder where the five pictures it said it uploaded have gone.

So What Else is Happening?

Hmmmm.....What Else indeed. Justin's birthday was yesterday. We all know I'm not very good at doing stuff for other people and this was one of my worst! I did nothing for the poor guy. He had a big weekend (the hawg roast was kind of his birthday party--with cake and pie even thanks to the kindness of Kristi and Nancy). And he bought himself a great gift. No way could I have come up with that! Maybe his 36th will be better. Justin's dad did come up yesterday though and it looked like the two of them had some good talks. David is heading south to Sonoma and then to Mexico and will be gone nearly a month. Wow! He certainly needs that vacation.

Audrey won a raffle prize at the library yesterday. During the Summer Reading Program kids can enter their name into a drawing when they read over an hour in a week. There are a bunch of different gift certificates to choose from and she chose one for a free doughnut from Krispy Kreme. No, we did not use it right away. Last night Audrey woke around 1am in a horrible mood. Holy Cow! She was at that incredibly tired point when everything is magnified. In this case it was her anger and frustration over her jammies. About half an hour later she was done crying and I could go back to sleep. Today she made me a card with a penguin on the front of it. Very cute. She pointed out one of the feet where she had to add a couple of toes. Otherwise it would have looked like a hoof. She was right! Those little cutenesses make up for the nights of insanity.

Emma is a reading machine! She's pretty fickle though. Well, kind of . She loves the Junie B. Jones series of books and doesn't have an interest in reading anything else. I'm trying though! The last two times we've gone to the library they haven't had any Junie B.'s that she hadn't already read. whew. I convinced her to start Charlotte's Web the other night. Here's where her fickleness comes in. She read one chapter of Charlotte's Web and the next day we went to the library and she checked out a new book. Charlotte's Web has been pushed aside and she's read the first chapter of this other book. I think it's called Dear Mr. Whiskers. She has also partly read Elevator Family and Only Emma. She gets a new book and starts it, leaving the other one behind. I think she and Gracie are also reading a book together but don't know how far they've gotten in it. Emma gets obsessed with the number of chapters in a book. If there are "too many" chapters she isn't interested in reading it. I've tried to tell her that if she's worried about the length of a book she should look at the number of pages not chapters. I even showed her a book I read with 10 chapters but well over 400 pages. Nope, not gettin' through. Funny kid. I've noticed she is a bit like me in that now that she can read well she reads pretty much anything with words that she can see. Yay!!

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own. Jessamyn West