The Greatest Easter Weekend Ever Part 1: The Preparations

Warning: Contains pictures of animal butchery some readers may find disturbing - although I maintain if you eat meat you ought to man up and to deal with the realities of where it comes from...

It's been the greatest Easter weekend ever here at SFH, despite being on call 2 out of the last 3 days. Most weekends we have a bring and share meal at one of our houses and it was definitely me and Pete's turn to host, so I thought it'd be fun to do a big Easter meal in our shared garden. First I ordered 3 chickens from my friend Alyda. We don't have a supermarket in Katete so if you want meat it comes super fresh!

I then got the idea into my head that it would be the best thing ever to spit roast a goat. There was quite a lot of naysaying and skepticism that it could be pulled off since I was starting completely from scratch, but once I had the idea I couldn't let it go! If you know me well, you'll know my dream in life is to live on a small holding raising my own livestock and growing my own vegetables, so the idea of spit roasting a whole animal is like a dream come true for me! My childhood self would be so pleased!

First I thought maybe we could construct a structure around our small fire pit:

But then I realised that would be a bit small. I hired some help from by buddy Benson and got him and his boys to build a fire pit that me and Adam designed. I also asked him if he could find me a goat. This all happened very last minute, so I wasn't sure if he'd be able to find one in time, but if anyone can it's Benson! 

After finishing my on call Friday morning we started building the fire pit. When I saw 'we' I mean Benson...

At this point we realised we didn't have any cement so I made a trip into Katete to buy a 50kg bag. Any Zambian would happily carry that on the back of their bike, but as a sissy mzungu I decided to take a taxi!

Next comes the gory bit... Benson managed to find a goat who we named Gary!

First I castrated poor Gary, because apparently if you slaughter them with the balls on it changes the flavour of the meat.

 Then Pete did the deed (in a gap on his on-call, hence the scrubs!)

And then we skinned it:

 And Benson's boys gutted it:

 I kept to skin to try to make a rug:

Benson said the way to preserve it is to pour salt on it and stick it on the roof to dry in the sun for a week.

I took it off the roof after the next morning when we got woken up at 5am by crows landing on our very noisy tin roof... and left it on the chicken coop where unfortunately the dogs must have found it, because it's disappeared. Oh well, it was pretty gross!

Benson had buried the balls, which Tiger soon found, dug up and ate! Mmmm!

On Saturday I was on call, but had a small break in the afternoon to join the pool party in James and Kate's garden.

Then in the evening we went to church:

An excellent start to the bank holiday weekend!