After my last post my email inbox bulged. A few said they thought the idea of spit roast goat was disgusting, a whole lot more said they wanted to try it. I guess some people are just fickle. Over the last week I have been really busy and the greenhouse I said I was going to leave fallow has been filled with summer vegetables and salad stuff. I hope to be able to pick stuff out of the greenhouse and use it as it is needed when I am cooking outside. I have done this quite successfully in the past with my herb garden and fresh herbs during the summer months have never been an issue for me.
Included in the bulging mail box was a letter from the people I had ordered the Brinkman Cimarron from informing that they no longer dealt with Brinkman owing to “quality issues” and they could not fulfil my order. They could however supply a substitute from a German company called Rumo and it would only cost me around 550 pounds more. This was considerably more than I was prepared to pay but I could not find another UK importer of the Cimarron model I wanted. They did agree to knock 250 pounds of the price for the inconvenience and I eventually decided I had no options if I wanted a decent off set smoker for this year. The total cost of the smoker including delivery is now 1200 pounds. Feeling battered in the pocket I counted up how much I have spent so far this year on BBQ stuff. It’s a lot more than I thought………..
I went to see the Beast on Monday evening gone and returned with a full boot load of cut logs from his garden. The next evening he turned up at mine with another load. I made a few trips to the fabricators shop to collect the final pieces for the home made spit and as they were not finished or as in one case made incorrectly I hope to have them in place for tomorrow morning. I called in to see Ted Magnum with what bits I had and discussed the project so far. Ted has done a magnificent job with welding drilling and painting. Unlike me Ted has a tendency to over engineer and he should really be working for Mercedes, whereas I like things to just work and not overly worry about the odd 1/16 of an inch here and there. On that note I would like to add that both he and I speak different languages. He is obsessed with millimetres and as I try telling him I still work in Imperial. Metric was not invented when I went to school! Aesthetics are a secondary consideration. In general I like things to look as Heath Robinson as possible so people can see things have been home made and time has been spent making things fit and do a job they were never intended to do in the first place. This to me is half the fun of making the spit. Ted like’s his engineering to look as though it has just come out a showroom and he gets as much fun out of making things as perfect as possible.
Tomorrow I should also take delivery of a lump of pig weighing around 30 pounds in weight both Ted and myself are hoping the spit will be ready on time which means finished for Saturday night. I am also taking delivery of 40 or so breeze blocks with which to build the fire pit over which the spit will stand. No amount of descriptive text would do what we intend to build any justice so I will post some photos in the gallery of the finished article some time next week. Hopefully I am now up to date and will let you all know what the meat is like when I go to the butchers tomorrow afternoon