To commemmorate the beginning of the third year of Roving Gastronome, I’m going to run a Best Of series for the next week or so.

It’s just like in the old sitcoms, when all the actors were too burned out to do anything at the end of the season, and they put together this cheesy montage of the most hilarious moments, all stuck awkwardly in some kind of shaky frame story that got all the actors sitting around the same diner table and reminiscing…

“Hey, Chachi, remember the time…that was sooooo funny…”

And then the people at the diner table go all wiggly, and presto, you’re back in some gem of a moment involving striped socks, a case of mistaken identity, and a monkey.

Or, in the case of Roving Gastronome, a hare-brained scheme, a 50-gallon drum, and two animal carcasses:

January 12, 2004:
If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing, or It Takes a Village to Roast a Pig (and a Lamb)

Who knew roasting a whole pig—plus a whole lamb, just for the heck of it—could be so easy? Well, aside from the creeping anxiety of spectacular failure beforehand, and the running around collecting weird bits of metal, and the blinding, acrid mesquite smoke the night of…it was pretty easy.

Perhaps foolishly, I did think it would be easy when Tamara first called to ask if she could delegate the pig-roasting duties for her second-annual overkill New Year’s Eve party, this time bearing a luau theme. Although Astoria has its suburban charms, Tamara doesn’t have a yard where you can dig a pit and pile in a pig, so we would have to rig up something—surely we could find some instructions on the Internet. Tamara is the quintessential hostess, and I can’t think of a better person to have as a patron of such a dodgy, expensive enterprise. “Don’t worry—if it doesn’t work, there’s always booze,” she airily assured me.

Peter was immediately deputized. When I notified him that he’d been tapped for large-animal-roasting duty, he said, “No problem. But if we’re going to all this trouble, we should roast a lamb too. My people have always roasted lambs.” Peter has some wicked strong Greek roots, which seemed irrelevant to a Hawaiian theme party, but as it happens, he does seem genetically predisposed to cranking a spit for five hours.

The other thing, aside from Peter’s Greekness, that made him want to roast a lamb, was our proximity to the not-telling-the-whole-truth Astoria Live Poultry, just down the block from me. This fabulous storefront traffics not just in chickens, capons, geese, quail, turkeys, ducks, guinea hens, pigeon, and rabbits, but also, just lounging casually in a back room, cows, lambs, and goats. It’s like a petting zoo, but not. I’ve gotten all manner of poultry there before, and was just working my way up to rabbits (they weigh everything in front of you, squawking and squirming, so you have to really look them in the eye; and the bag of meat they give you is still warm, which is weirdly comforting). But Peter was all for jumping straight to the head of the class.

But first we put aside the meat details to focus on engineering. Four days later, and plenty of URLs about smokin’ hawgs and trussing little lambies swapped, we really hadn’t decided anything or purchased any materials or even agreed on just how much meat we’d be dealing with. Over lunch, we could only mutter tersely at each other: “Let’s not talk about it.” “OK. Yeah, later.” We had only two days left.

But lo, on Tuesday, the day before Spit-Crankin’ Day, everything fell into place: Peter found a 50-gallon-drum at a scrap yard, as well as a hefty iron I-beam to support the barrel and keep it off the patio surface (which was also the roof of Tamara’s downstairs neighbors’ apartment–a small fire code infraction). We bought about a hundred pounds of mesquite at Home Despot, as charcoal seemed to be out of season. Our metalworking friend Joel made a spit and sawed the barrel in half. And Ali, world’s greatest chef and all-around generous guy, let us borrow his car to haul all the crap around.

Wednesday morning dawned late and too brightly. We’d all been at Ali’s place, the Kabab Cafe, too late, celebrating our triumphant requisition of supplies with buckets of wine. Peter asked if I’d nip down to the corner and order the lamb, but I demurred—my eyes were too bleary to face a little lamb. But it’s a full-service establishment, with delivery, and took him seriously when he requested $120 worth of meat by phone, with no deposit.

Meanwhile, Tamara picked up the pig, which she’d ordered through Prune. It had been boned, so it was like a big sausage with a head–I think it was about 25 or 30 pounds of pure meat. We had to do a mucky but fun maneuver of removing the too-short wooden stake the pig had been trussed on and ramming a longer one in–an operation that took three people and inspired Deb to comment, “This is kind of sexy, actually.”

The lamb required a little more attention. None of our Internet- and Ali-derived information on lamb trussing seemed particularly helpful, and we couldn’t get the spit to lodge tightly anywhere in the lamb, so Peter just resorted to a lot of kitchen twine and plenty of special sliding boat knots. At one point I had to hold the lamb’s head down while Peter tied it in place–its small skull fit nicely in my hand, and there was a little tuft of fur still left on its forehead, which I couldn’t help rubbing a little.

Meanwhile, we’d also gotten our fire going in our spit setup: the I-beam was just long enough to support and stabilize both barrel halves, set next to each other (lucky–we’d been a little optimistic about fitting both animals in one barrel half). Cinder blocks were propped at the ends of each of the barrels, coincidentally just the right height for resting the spits on.

We hoisted the pig into place around 5:30 p.m., and the lamb went on a half-hour later. The pig had been stuffed by the butcher with assorted herbs and prosciutto. The lamb got garlic cloves stuck under its skin and doused in a mixture of citrus juice (mostly lemon, but also grapefruit and several other things Peter had at home) and at least a cup of ground spices–cinnamon, turmeric, pepper, paprika, cayenne, nutmeg, cumin, black pepper. Peter probably added lots more red chile.

Here we parted ways: Peter settled himself into a chair with a big bottle of retsina and a big bunch of dill for swabbing the marinade on periodically. He maintained that the lamb required constant turning, and he was probably right. And he was glad to do it, the picture of Greek village manliness in a long, blood-smeared apron and a big furry hat. As for the pig, Joel and Deb took turns cranking it, but after a while, when the mesquite smoke reached toxic levels and the fun wore off (it was only the manufactured Tom-Sawyer-getting-his-friends-to-whitewash-the-fence kind of fun anyway), I made an executive decision that it didn’t have to be turned constantly, as it was balanced better on its spit and didn’t flop the way the lamb did. I’m really surprised that the neighbors didn’t call the fire department–there was seldom any visible flame, but the smoke was incredibly sharp, thick and almost oily.

After about 4.5 hours, I made another executive decision: the pig was done. I was wrong–or partially. We just chopped it up bit by bit, putting the cooked pieces on a serving platter and chucking the others into a hotel pan to finish in the oven. What made it a little tricky was that the smoke had made a lot of the outer layer of meat turn pink and look (and feel) a little raw, which had to be explained to guests. Nobody really bought my declaration that “trichinosis is sooo over.” The skin had also gotten seriously charred, though we did end up with a few good chunks of crispy chicharron. The meat was delicious, though not mind-blowingly succulent–the fire had been too hot for that, I think, and too much moisture lost. Some guests objected to the display of the head along with the meat, so it was covered with a napkin and sunglasses. Deep apologies, pig—we really meant no disrespect.

About an hour later, the lamb was deemed done, or maybe Peter just got tired of cranking. Again, about half of the meat had to be finished in the oven. But the meat was stupendously delicious—a little smoky, a little tangy, very moist, with no single spice predominating. The strongest endorsement came from Barbara, a surprise guest who really got into the primal fun of breaking down the meat (a business so messy that Tamara wailed, “There’s lamb in my bed!” the next day). With the carcass splayed out on a bench behind her, Barbara happily gnawed on a greasy rib bone and rolled her eyes: “I can’t believe I was a vegetarian for eight years!”