One Fine Pig.

Maybe you have never been to a pig roast. Maybe you have never combined the three key elements of manhood (Fire, meat, alcohol) into a daylong orgy of the senses, or maybe you wish you could but you need an excuse. If that's the case, you should join a sailing club, become the social dude, and put a beast roast on the schedule.

Really roasting a pig has very little to do with sailing, but its fun, can be done at the marina, and I put it on the sailing club schedule, so it qualifies for the Iris blog. Besides, I left the pig alone long enough to sail a race, so it has to count as a sailing adventure.

This was not my first pig roast, but it had been a few years since I had done one. In the time between I had moved and rules had changed, but the key elements were still the same.

There are only 3 ingredients to a successful pig roast.

1. A pig
2. Fire
3. Alcohol

And the recipe is pretty is pretty simple:

1. Start the fire
2. Rotate the pig over it
3. Drink alcohol

Once either the pig or the alcohol is done, its time to eat. If you are drunk enough you won't care how the pig is cooked, and if you still have some booze once the pig's cooked, then you have something to wash the meat down with.

The thing I messed up with on this roast was the timing. Previously the roasters I had used were open-topped. This one was a big kettle that sealed shut. Since it sealed shut the pig cooked in half the time I had expected. Dinner was scheduled for 5:00 PM, but Wilbur (you should always name your pig) was cooked by 1:30.

What can you do with the extra 3.5 hours? Get more alcohol would be a good thing, but instead, I stood around worrying. We took the pig off the roaster and covered it to keep flies away, and while we waited I paced, wrung my hands, and acted like things were perfectly fine. It was pointed out to me that you can't really screw up a pig roast, so I calmed down long enough to set up tables and get the serving area laid out as guests started to arrive.

Then I put Wilbur back on the roaster for 10 minutes just to warm him back up. Not long after going back over the fire Wilbur showed his "fall off the bones" goodness by breaking in half. Yup, just behind his head, same spot as last time. Good thing I had secured him to the spit at multiple points.

We took him off the fire, slid him onto the table and then the skipper from Newfie Screach and I sliced the meat away from the carcass.

Dinner was a great success. The members of the sailing club brought every kind of bread and salad you can imagine to go with the meat, and there were half a dozen different kinds of pie, cakes, and cookies for dessert.

We were lucky with the weather too. The rain held off until everyone was done dinner, and then poured. It helped with the cleanup. You've never seen folks run so fast to get things put away.

All in all it was a great event. And in the words of Charlotte, Wilbur was Terrific!