One of the more irritating aspects of my life is that I go through these long protracted periods of painful activity where things that I care about whither. One of those things is my blog.
Like last year, my wife and I decided to cook a whole lamb. Unlike last year, where half the fun was in trying to find the right components, this year was all about execution.

Here you can see the lamb:

purchased from Draeger’s.

You can see farmer kostadis bring the lamb into the house with his trusty dog Tony:

My wife helped me tie the lamb up (okay she did most of the tieing!):

With the lamb trussed, we could begin the process of cooking the lamb. Now it turns out that machinery exists to dramatically reduce the manual labour involved (approximately 5 hours of rotating) but manual labour does have it’s advantages:

Something tells me that the delightful nibble plate you see on the table would not have been made by my wife if we were using a motor.

This year’s innovation was to use a small plank of wood in addition to the 6 foot dowel. The plank reduced the strain on our wrists. Check out my friend Marcin rotating the lamb:

Marcin helped the most in this effort, showing up at 12:00 noon. But there were more. Some of the people I managed to take pictures of.
Jay Moorthi:

And later David Grunwald

Brian Quirion

And my youngest assistant was Lincoln Mendenhall:

When the cooking was done, we could begin the carving:

Of course, this is a Greek Easter, so having lamb is considered only part of the meal. We had an incredible spread of other food (that this time we took pictures of):

My wife and I look exhausted, and little did we know that we were only half way done at that point …

My old and dear friend Sanford Barr showed up:

All in all it was a great party with approximately 42 sentient (if you count dogs) there. The only tragic victim was my stuffed dog who had wine spilled all over him. Here we see him suffering over the bathtub:

And here we see the dastardly villain who spilled the wine trying to clean him:

For more pictures check out: http://kostadis.smugmug.com/gallery/2849696#152773237