Piggies

Following on from the hens and George let me introduce the pigs to you. Me and my pig buddy Graham keep a few pigs each year for our own use. I wont lie to you it is a bit of hassle, not cheap, they are buggers to move anywhere, they eat you out of house and home, they do bite but on the flipside they just taste so good! We name ours which was against all advice but we tried not to lose focus on why we were keeping them, and so it came to be that they were called Sausage and Bacon!

This post is really just to give you an idea of what we do with them but over the summer I hope to give you a blow by blow account of how things go this year.
Essentially the idea is simple you buy a few weaners at 8 or 10 weeks old and you fatten them all summer and kill them in late autumn or early winter(just in time for Christmas!). You then have pork and porky products nearly all year long. We are still enjoying them now nearly 8 months since we killed our first pig and there is still a Parma ham hanging up in Graham’s porch that may or may not be ok. More of our tales of woe with the Parma ham in a later post.

We don’t kill them at home but take them to the local abattoir and they give us back the pork a few days later. We then turn it into all sorts of things. We make our own sausages, bacon, Christmas hams, Parma hams, chorizo, saucisson, pancetta, pate, you name it we have given it a shot. Some things have gone a bit tits up but I couldn’t say anything was unpleasant, just not what we expected. We usually draft in some help from friends for our "Pig Weekend" and have a big pig party to celebrate the life of Sausage and Bacon, almost like an Irish wake! The menu is predominantly porky as you can imagine however last year even a veggie managed to get in. She didn’t complain much although I am not sure there was much for her to eat!

So that’s it for now on the piggies. I will keep you posted on how we are getting on with the new batch over the summer; no doubt there will be plenty of fun and games.
In the mean time here are some pics of last year's piggie adventure.