Pigfest 2010
Yesterday the kids and I went to the home of Rob Sama for an Independence Day party, which I'd forgotten would be the annual repeat of his original Pigfest. Additional posts on that from Rob's old Deus Ex Culina blog are here, here, here and here.
The pulled pork from the whole suckling pig was amazing!
Sides were minimal, as it was mainly about the pork. You might not appreciate this kind of thing if it really squicks you out to see the food looking to much like the animal along the way, and really, the pig blackened on the outside from the smoker does look a little disgusting. But is it really worse than seeing a turkey or a chicken whole? Which, granted, some people also find offputting. There was a fantastic potato salad and a yummy cole slaw. Henry loved the pork, but couldn't eat those. Mayonaisse has eggs. I think he sampled cheddar & sour cream chips, which were the main thing Sadie ate. The food issues she has are going to drive me nuts, and are voluntary, unlike his. She tasted the pork, to her credit, and didn't like it. She wouldn't even try the potato salad or coleslaw. By the time she got a hot dog that the dog didn't steal before she could eat it (I tried to get her to sit where that would be less likely!), she wasn't so interested anymore. Then again, none of the kids have had much appetite in this heat. Valerie liked the pork, but didn't eat a lot as Henry did.
There were rolls and four kinds of barbecue sauce, each of which I had to sample. I liked the 2 sweet sauces. The homemade Carolina style sauce was good but not to my preference. The hot sauce was good but very hot. It was what I had the most of, though, because it ran all over my plate and overwhelmed everything. Mostly the pork itself was what I ate, unadulterated. It was almost bacon-like in flavor, with the softness of well cooked pork. Or perhaps I could say it was ham-like.
Herding the kids didn't give me much time fo socializing, which I am not always comfy with anyway. There were other kids, mostly glued to the Wii, which Valerie and Sadie didn't get to play to speak of, relegated to watching, but they found some of the games they've never seen to be interesting.
Finally, there was a dessert that Kate made, which looks just amazing. It was thin layers of red and blue jello, requiring painstakingly waiting for each prior layer to set, and with some of the layers containing sour cream. Jello is jello, but the sour cream... wow! I let Henry taste it, despite the sour cream. After a couple bites, he fed the rest to me.
When I bought gas on the way, I knew I needed something to make the kids happy and give them fuller bellies, so I looked in the gas station store thinking chips. They had a cool selection of inexpensive candies like gummies. Got gummy worms, spearmint leaves, spice drops and... haven't seen these for years... wax bottles! Kids got gummies on the ride up. They enjoyed the ride itself, and are seldom ill behaved in the car, but that helped. I brought spice drops in when I went back to the car for the camera, ended up corrupting the other kids, who just loved them. Saved the spearmint leaves and bottles for the ride home. The kids were nuts about the wax bottles. In a way, those are lame. I mean, it's a smidge of drink in a wax bottle. You open and suck it out, and/or chew the wax to get the liquid/flavor. If you're me, you spit the wax out. Hello, it's wax. It made such an impression, Valerie had a fit this morning because none were available.
Anyway, it was fun and a nice ride and I would totally go again just for the pig. Not sure the kids loved it, but Sadie would have had more fun if she'd not been in the cast and anchored mainly in one spot.
I found it interesting that in a Reader's Digest discussion of my childhood environment, growing up in the woods, it was impossible not to mention something I have been censored from blogging about. How do you just completely cut out formative parts of your life like that? But I digress.