Just back from Pig Mountain. How did it go? Well my mailbox is full of mushy e-mails from all the guys I spent a testosterone packed weekend with.

What a bunch of softies.

It was amazing.  The event brought out almost 1000 people.  The days leading up to it were filled with great food, great humor and the kind of calm and harmony you can only experience in the Big Chill. Gross, no?

I'm going to be posting the photos here. So much to say but thanks to kismet, we had the very amazing Randy Harris following us with his camera all weekend. The following photos are just from the first day of prep. Randy made us look so much cooler than we are.  And trust me, I was there.  We're just not quite that cool. (unless otherwise noted, all photo in this post were taken by Randy Harris.)

The photos can say so much more than I can but of course, I'll have to throw in my reparte. I'm going to try to start from the beginning.

-- This is Matt Solomon. He is my other half in Pig Mountain. Where I took care of the chefs, he took care of pretty much everything else. All things Sullivan County. He also is the oven master. The best guy to have build you an oven, a pit, a kiln.  He's also a lawyer.  At Pig Mountain, everybody multi-tasks.

This is the same pit after 6 hours of burning wood and letting it cool down to embers.  Matt got there at midnight and we all showed up to relieve him and get the pigs seasoned and in the pits.

I'm not really sure Matt slept all weekend.  Not to say that I did either.....or anybody else for that matter.  Let's get back to business:

Awesome shot of pit.  We had two pits.

We have lots of cool photos of random stuff thanks to Randy. I'm throwing those in to make up for the crap shots I usually accost you with. Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition. I am aware.

So, we seasoned our pigs

Pig preseasoned

This is me on the right, Anthony Sasso of Casa Mono on the left and George McKirdy of Astor Bake Shop right behind him. Anthony and I are going nuts on the salt on Lee Anne Wong's pig.  She had a crazy day of traffic trying to get to the farm. There was a lot of team work this weekend.

This is what went into one of the pigs for seasoning.  Ryan Tate of the soon to open All Good Things brought 70 lbs of onions with him to the pit site.  The ride up was all about burning eyes and jokes about the smell of onions.  He also took this gorgeous photo.

We wrapped the seasoned pigs in banana leaves, wet burlap and chicken wire.

More random cool photos:

And a rare photo of Randy, the new official photographer of Pig Mountain.  That's him with the cat with a ton of toes.

And we started putting our pigs into the pits:

Covered them with more wet burlap:

and covered it with dirt and waited until the next day all the while keeping our fingers crossed.

And started with our prep.  Lots of veg.

Shawn Gawle getting his corn on:

My roasted carrot raita.  I wrapped up carrots with salt, oil and black cardamom pods and put them in the burning embers. The carrots were then mixed with yogurt, kosher salt, black salt and dried mint.  Whoa.  This ended up on my tandoori roast pork sandwich with tomato ketchup and onion we roasted inside the pig.

I'm including this photo not just because I'm prepping vegetables but because it needs to be said that Randy may have taken the best photo of me ever.  God bless you Randy Harris.

So, back to reality.  There was fiddling around with propane,

picking of herbs:

marinating,

(this is Matt Ridgeway and Shawn Gawle.  They pulled up with a trailor hitch that contained a full mobile kitchen.  They had us at "Hola".  After I showed them where they'd be sleeping---a room in an old barn---after only having met us all an hour before in the pitch dark, I heard one say to the other "Dude, best event ever already."   Matt and Shawn, you won our hearts.)

(photo Ryan Tate)

And this is what their pig looked like.  Yes, I know. Too awesome.

(photo Heather Carlucci)

They even made us sticky buns. Love.

This is Luke Deardurff from Print grilling.  He's our rock star.

(photo Ryan Tate)

ooh, just found this photo. This is Matt and Shawn's kitchen set-up.

(photo Ryan Tate)

The fabulous Ms. Lee Anne Wong with Anthony Sasso eyeing his porchetta..

(photo Ryan Tate)

The shots of the actual event and all that went with it coming soon. Pigs out of the pits, Narrowsburg, people eating pig, band playing.  Baby, it was groovy.

Stay tuned for what we each made that day and if we'll do this again.

Here's a parting shot of Jake Klein of Morrell Wine Bar. He did Balinese cuisine. We were humbled.

(photo Ryan Tate)