you're brutal, que malo

yes, I know. I am evillllllll....

BWUAHAHAHAHAHA

OMG is all I can say. That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Y donde estan los moros y la yuca? MMMMmmmmm too bad it's not a scratch and sniff :-(

would you believe I had decent (not great) but decent lechon and arroz con frijoles at the Broward Library cafeteria this afternoon? maybe there is hope in Broward County....

BTW, that roast pork image is deadly dude....

Oye Babalu, I see the LECHON , but where is the bread? hehehehehe. Something else missing there??? let me think!!! ICE COLD BEER!!!

Very true, No ay ma''na

I would love a slice of that lathered in my Mami's mojo!

Not nice.

Not nice at all.

;-)

You are so CRUEL!!!!!!!!! How can you this to us????

Co~no Val!
Stop torturing us out-of-towners with goodies that are inaccessible to us.
You do want to keep us coming back here, do you not?
:)
The day that some enterprising Miami Cuban figures out how to ship boxes of these delicacies cheaply and quickly enough, so they will retain their full flavor, we'll have another millionaire in the ranks.
I have a friend who is a Civil War reenactor in New Jersey, and every once in a while, he surprises me at an event with an authentic Cuban sandwich, hand-delivered from Union City. Once he brought me two... and I ate them both (on different days... I'm not a pig!).
Ah, what joyful memories!
You have no idea what a sense of empowerment one gets while eating a Cuban sandwich where one of the battles of the War Between the States was fought... or anywhere else.
JulioZ

Julio, resolver - roll up your sleeves and start cooking. Val even linked the recipe to make it easy for us. First you need La Caja China, then you have to find a pig...

What is lechon?

Ziva,
I'm working on it. I already located two sources of whole pigs (hopefully, killed and dressed) in the Washington DC area.
But I don't know if I want to get a Caja China, since I have a very large backyard that would be ideal for a pit barbecue, just the way my family used to cook the pig first in Cuba and then in Miami.
To Dean Esmay, lech'on is cooked pig, just the way it looks in Val's cruel photograph. Yummy stuff for us infidels!
JulioZ

Pit BBQ? Julio is that the same as "lechon a la vara"?

La Ventanita,
I believe it is the same thing. My family used to dig a pit on the ground, put in a huge load of charcoal (or as we called it Cuba, carb'on) and when it was glowing nicely, place the animal on a metal grid suspended above the fire.
Initially, the pig, split lengthwide and opened up like a butterfly, would be placed with the "inner" side down. Once it cooked for a certain length of time, it would be turned (that is, with the skin side down) so the outside would get nice and crinkly. Throughout the process, a lot of homemade mojo would be dabbed to the innards. We even grew our own sour oranges.
For some reason I don't quite understand, the carcass would be covered with fresh banana leaves during the cooking process. Maybe to hold the heat in, I guess, similar to the purpose of the Caja China.
But we were country folk, so we used the banana leaves, which we could cut for nothing right in our own backyard. I never even heard of a Caja China until I became a Babalublog.com reader.
To this day, I keep a small banana tree in a pot inside my house (I brought it back from a pilgrimage to Florida many years ago), and every time I look at it, I think back to the days when we cooked whole pigs in our backyard.
After what seemed like an eternity, with the delicious smells driving anyone within blocks crazy with hunger, the cook would deem the animal done --and then the entire family would, literally, pig out.
Ah, what days!
The last pig I cooked was in the backyard of our house in Miami, about 20 years ago. It caught fire, but that's a story for another time.
JulioZ
P.S. Did you receive the package I sent you?

How DID you manage to carve them before you had a decent knife?

Ay Julio, now I am craving Lechon Asado, and yes it is the same thing. Don't worry I never heard of la Caja China until my time in Miami. And nope, I haven't received the package you sent me, cuando lo enviaste?

The package was mailed Thursday or Friday... same time as Val's. Give it a couple more days, then I will follow-up with the local post office.
JulioZ

Don't worry, people here are very laid back, and so is the post office.

Julio, the banana leaves are used in latin cooking and especially in roasts. It helps keep the moisture in....

That looks painful.

Is that pig daid?

Thank you, Mike, I figured there had to be a more practical reason than merely making the scene look more "country" by placing those leaves on top of the pig.
Murel, it's not painful at all. The pig squeals a bit, at first, but it soon stops, long before someone drills holes on its rear legs, then scald the carcass with boiling water, then cut it open from the neck to the end of the animal's digestive tract with very sharp knives and then proceed to rip its innards out. All that before it gets hauled over to the bed of burning coal. Good Lord, that description sounds perfectly barbarian --I'm sure I have, at the very least, incurred the wrath of PETA already!
But I love lech'on asado, so the 'ell with 'em!
JulioZ