Hog Roast

 I've been thinking; it sure is fun to be me!  It feels like I do all kinds of really cool stuff; but then I realized that most likely everybody thinks it cool to be "them" as well, because they do the stuff that they think is cool and fun.  As odd as it sounds, I'm sure there were lots of people that wouldn't want to butcher and cook a whole hog.  But on Saturday, I accomplished something that has been a lifelong dream of mine, and something that always thought would  be really cool to do.  I butchered and cooked a whole hog!

It was the biggest hog I had; I think the kids called him "Ham-ster." I sure he outweighed me; probably 170 pounds.  I will spare the gruesome pictures of blood and guts; I consider these pictures to be pretty G-rated.  After killing it and bringing it up to the shed, I hung it up and dumped it into the barrel of water next to it; heated up to around 160-180 degrees.  Once we dipped him and let him sit for a couple minutes, the hair came of really nicely! We just scraped him with my butcher knife and/or canning jar lids; it worked better than I had imagined.

Emma on the job!

 Washing the freshly scraped pig:

 After gutting it, we "butterflied" it, so that it would lay flat and cook more evenly.

 Prepping the Grill.  I made this grill about 5 years ago with this purpose in mind.  It took me several years of picking away at it to get it done.  One thing I am learning about life and about myself is that despite the fact that I want everything to happen all at once, it just takes time and patience.  And "stick-to-it-iveness."

 Moving the meat onto the grill.  It was a big challenge getting it into the grill.  I was pretty proud of us rookies; our time was from the pig walking around to meat on the grill in right at 3 hours!

 Done and ready to cook!

 This is ThePaulPage and I pulling it out after about 5 hours of cooking.  We are just going to flip it over and Endo it.  This time it was a little more nerve racking because it was very hot now...

Very unprofessional picture; can't figure out how to rotate this picture once I've uploaded it on to Blogger. Anyway, you get the idea; the meat is done.

Pulling the pig!  And eating a lot of it too!  Hard to not pick at it when your pulling...  It cooked for a total of 7 hours; should have had another hour on it, I think. It fell off the bone well enough, but could have been a little better.

It is too bad I don't have any pictures of people sitting around eating it; I think we just sort of forgot about the pictures.  I had requested a very low key event, in case it turned out bad or wasn't done soon enough.  I didn't want 50 hungry people sitting around mad because their food wasn't ready yet.  As it turned out, everything was OK and I have a little more confidence now about it...  

Afterwards, we vac-packed what we didn't give away and froze it in 1-2# packages.  Sunday, we had four out of four kids with racking coughs, so we didn't go to church, and I spent ALL morning and part of the afternoon cleaning up the shed even though I thought I had it pretty well cleaned up Saturday night.