After a certain point, everything I write starts to sound the same: we cooked a big meal, it was delicious, and we all love each other soooo much. Well, it’s true. But boring.

OK, we strung up a huge hunk of meat, flame-broiled that baby, danced like beasts, and went home strangely sober. That’s true too–even if perhaps harder to believe.

No, what’s really interesting is the mechanics of this particular lamb roast. Also, our newly blase attitude. It was Victoria’s birthday, and if any girl deserves a whole animal to be cooked in her honor it’s her, because she will certainly appreciate it. So Tamara says one night, ‘Hey, we’ll roast you a lamb.’ Roundabout two days before, Peter wakes Tamara out of a hungover doze, or vice versa, and they talk about how they’re gonna do it. Peter chats with Ali again (this is the crucial part). We roll in around 3pm on Sunday afternoon, light the coals, and sit back to drink wine and read the paper. We’re old hands.

But not afraid of new tricks. See, like I said, this is the interesting part: Peter talked to Ali early in the day (remember the first New Year’s roast, when we asked his advice? Yeah, none of us were at our articulate best at 11pm), and Ali dispensed the true, if heretical, wisdom: Don’t roast the lamb whole.

Here’s the deal: You string the shoulders and legs on the spit. You brown and braise the shanks. You slice up the ribs into chops. You cut off the flank and trim that into steaks. You cut the remaining loin off the backbone. You put the head in a pot and make stock, then add lentils for soup. You bread the brain and fry it up in a pan. You fry up the liver with onions. It sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, but what else would we be doing all day? The Sunday Styles section can wait. Also, I think it’s a sneaky way to eat more total lamb, because you’re tasting all different flavors and textures.

Ali helped this whole process by drawing elaborate diagrams that specified, for instance, what the flank steak would look like: layer of fat, layer of meat, layer of fat, layer of meat. He even wrote out in Arabic instructions for the live-poultry butchers, if we insisted on going there (“Those guys are stupid,” Ali pointed out). Instead, Peter went to a Greek butcher. (I know, I know! No visit to the petting zoo! No lamb killed at our command!)

I hate to say it, but I think the Greek stuff was better. It makes sense: it was actually aged a bit, which is better for red meat. It probably came from somewhere where lambs are fat and happy, not stringy and anxious. Given the choice between a 30-pound baby and a 60-pound monstruo, Peter of course went large. The butcher chopped it up in the recommended pieces, though he no longer had the original 60-pounder’s head, so he had to sub a smaller one. If a ghost ever haunts Tamara’s house, it will be the ghost of that mismatched lamb, its head all shrunken on a massive body, bleating sadly in the kitchen in the middle of the night.

I was busy exercising my newfound right to buy wine on Sunday, so I didn’t get to T’s until around 4pm, by which time the legs and shoulders were already trussed and on the skewer. The coals were burning down, along with a big length of lumber that Karl had scavenged from a building site–a classy touch. The sun was shining. The paper was still to be read.

And then I was faced with the a terrible choice, one that officially took me away from ever being able to claim I was some kind of lamb-roast aficionado.

“Zora, do you want to help me chop up the ribs?” Peter asked, brandishing his cleaver.

“Zora, can you help me with the cupcakes?” Tamara inquired from the doorway.

I picked the cupcakes. I feel like such a failure. Such a bad feminist. But I had said I’d help Tamara make the lemon-coconut business, and it just seemed like the more expedient thing at the time. And Peter didn’t really need help with the ribs anyway–he was just trying to sweet-talk me.

But that was my last chance. I mean, I did a tiny bit of cranking at the beginning, and did some emergency re-trussing, but after that, I was out of the loop. I’d missed the part where they put the head in the stockpot, and I even got squeamy when I had a bite of the brains–the texture is just not natural. I can’t even think what to compare it to: warm soft-serve ice cream?

Frying up the liver was my job, though, and the smell of it was just lovely and Proustian–overcooked a bit, though, despite my father’s voice echoing in my head: “The trick is to not overcook it. You get it in a restaurant, and they always ruin it, just like that.” Yeah–just like that. Next time.

But back to the main course: The stuff on the skewer required an emergency reorganization, when the center shoulder pieces were finished but the legs on the ends of the skewer still weren’t done. I missed that action too, but apparently the switcheroo was pretty lively. It sounded like they had some good help out front, because someone had angled the TV so that you could watch the football game only if you were seated in the chair where you cranked the spit. Excellent incentivizing.

Around 2:45 in the cooking process, Karl came in and started carving the done stuff up; I think the bigger legs were done another half-hour or so later. Karl proved to be a master with the knife–those bones looked like they’d been born with no meat on them. Of course I gave positive reviews because he kept sliding little cracklings over my way. It was all very good timing, because the house had gotten full by then and we were approaching that danger zone of too much drink and not enough food. But pretty soon, about 20 people were lolling around the living room, scraping up couscous, fattoush, the most beautiful orange-date-arugula business, fennel, ratatouille, and of course pounds and pounds of perfectly medium-rare flesh to wash down all those blasted veggies.

While everyone was busy on the main course, there were some special treats happening on the porch. Naomi rigged up the barbecue grill inside the drum, and they tossed the ribs right on, with a little oregano and salt. When I passed some around the living room, I felt like the cater waiter at some book party or something, swarmed by broke people charging for the free mini cheese puffs.

Luckily, a couple of the ribs got set aside for Ali, and I think that’s what helped get him to come over after he shut down the resto for the night. When he walked in, Tamara was astounded: “In my house! I never thought I’d see you here!” We’d been puttering around, washing up, but having the man who dispensed the lamb wisdom arrive to approve of our work called for several nightcaps. I think he was sad to have missed Adrienne’s earlier African-dance lesson in the back kitchen/dancefloor area, when there were about five of us in various stages of Polaroid-picture-shaking. But what can you do? We eventually sent him off with some Orangina-and-rum concoction, and helped ourselves to our own beds, all of us smelling deliciously of wood smoke. And we all loved each other so much. The End.

Well, not quite. I do have to mention one interesting thread about these three lamb roasts: They’ve gotten progressively Greeker. I shouldn’t be surprised–we do live in Astoria, and Peter is demi-Greek and very influential in his food tastes. But it is funny how we started with a luau-theme pig roast and Peter just snuck the lamb in there, then we went through that Turkish-wedding phase which is really a lot like Greek anyway (I hope Cypriot freedom fighters don’t find this on Google and come to kill me), and now we just ran straight to the Greek butcher on this one, and served up three bowls of tzatziki on the side. By the end of the night, Peter was in the kitchen with Val and Angelique, the two Greek sisters, listening to a CD of some standup comedian named Basile: “Oooh, Yiayia! This casseroulie tastes like skata!” [The crowd roars.]

This is how it happens– Pretty soon we’ll all be getting baptized and wearing all black. Meanwhile, though, we’ve got enough lamb to get us through Easter at least. And pictures are on the way.