Christmas Pig

Gem here. Pork has always been a celebration meal in my family. Every year Mum would ask my sisters and I what we wanted as our special birthday dinner and each time without fail we would exclaim: "roast pork with crackling"! So when good friends asked us and another family over for a pre-Christmas get together and then followed it up with they were cooking suckling pig on the beach- my mouth was watering.....

Our host M went down to one of the local Cayman farms the day before the feast to pick up the freshly slaughtered, neat little BBQ size piglet only to find he was presented with a humongous 50lb hog! The same height as M's 4 year old son, not only was it too big for the esky (and had to spend the night in the bathtub filled with ice) but he was now going to have to find a way to cook it. With the help of the other husbands, a new chicken roaster, a few trips to the hardware shop for modifications and a bike tyre found on the side of the road to help manually turn the monstrosity, M had himself a 'pig on the spit'. Stuffed with vegetables and herbs, slow roasted over a fire on the beach in the gorgeous salty sea air for around 8 hours and basted periodically with fresh coconut water plucked from a nearby palm tree, we had ourselves the most succulent roast pork I have tasted in a long time with a full coat of the snappiest crackling so no one would go without. Thanks M, what a celebration meal to remember!! 



Fresh coconut crust (note the ingenious bike tyre!)



                                           

Devoured!