Pig roast tests fire fighting skills
Some things can be accomplished with little prior knowledge or outside help, such as sweeping the floor, folding a washcloth or flossing your teeth. On the other hand, flying a plane, performing brain surgery and assembling a small child's toy all require great amounts of instruction and guidance along the way. Roasting a pig happens to fall into the latter category, which neither my husband or I realized until we tried to cook a little piggy. With several weeks having passed since we cooked the pig, my husband and I can now laugh about the entire event. But the morning of the roast, we were both on the verge of tears and on the verge of burning down our house with flames from the pig.
We did not enter this roast blind. The owner of the roaster had gone over the instructions with us several times, as well as with his daughter (and our cohort) several times. We had printed page after page of information from the Internet. And friends and family had offered input and advice about roasting the pig. But at 4 a.m. on the morning of the roast, my husband and I found ourselves alone -- except for 250 pounds of raw pig laying on our picnic table, briquettes that would not catch fire and the sound of howling coyotes inching their way closer. Within the next hour, all that would change and not for the better. After wrestling half the pig into the roaster, our problem with the briquettes had changed from little warmth into six-foot flames. I was waiting for the increasingly closer sound of coyotes to be replaced by the howl of firetruck sirens as the pig quickly became blackened. After weeks of planning, we were going to have to call everyone and tell them to bring hamburger and hot dogs to our pig roast that night because the pig had been reduced to the size and color of a piece of charcoal. We desperately needed more tinfoil to protect the pig, so I made a mad dash to the store. As I sped along the dark, deserted roads, I composed my tale for any police officer who happened to stop me -- "Officer, I've got 250 pounds of pork going up in flames right now. If I don't get back with tinfoil soon, my dog is going to be the only one to taste this pig" -- and hoped he would stop laughing long enough to believe me. Upon returning with enough tinfoil to line the streets of McCook and after rousing our cohort and another helper from bed, we managed to get the pig cooking ... three hours after we started. (This included calling the owner of the roaster -- Dean Jolly of Lebanon -- for further instructions and giving him the best laugh he's had in years.) Nearly 12 hours later, the pig was pulled from the roaster, prepared and served to the ravenous crowd circling the roaster (having replaced the coyotes).
What did we learn from this experience? First, none of us who helped with the pig could work as a hit man. Not only were the pig-halves hard to handle, but we could barely lift them, much less a dead body. Second, make sure you have back-up help arranged and that their phones are in working order so you won't have to pull them from their beds, literally. And finally, bigger is not always better, especially when it comes to roasting a pig over an open flame. Originally, it sounded impressive to have a live pig which weighed more than our entire family put together. Plus, we didn't know how much pork our friends and family could consume, so we wanted to err on the safe side with a porker of a pig. We didn't realize that the larger the pig, the harder it would be to heave the pig half into the roaster. The larger the pig, the harder it would be to turn the carcass in the roaster. The larger the pig, the harder it would be to find freezer space for the leftovers. Even with a family of seven and dozens of family and friends in attendance, we had a little bit of pig left over after the roast and we're quickly growing tired of pork enchiladas, pork chili, pork and eggs, pork and beans ...
-- With one pig under their belts, Ronda Graff and her husband are now seasoned "experts" in roasting -- but they don't want to see another pig carcass for several years.