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Dec 06 - All Good Things Must Come To An End After having looked after Delboy & Rodney for nearly 6 months it was now time for them to be slaughtered.
In the run up to the big day though, it all started to go wrong.
A friend of a friend had previously agreed to slaughter and butcher Delboy & Rodney for us, but at the 11th hour he said that unless we had "3 phase electric" (commercial voltage) then he couldn't do it.
Then, we both went down with flu - Tracey first and then she lovingly shared her germs with Dan (who was, of course, much sicker and closer to death!!!) This really was flu of the worst kind and all we could do was stay in bed.
Once we had recovered, we began a frantic search trying to find someone who could both slaughter and butcher our pigs at home.
We can't remember how many times we said "you don't know us, but we've been given your name as someone who might be able to help us"
This time of the year, most farmers and butchers are fully booked killing pigs for people and all of a sudden we knew exactly how Mary & Joseph felt when all they heard was "no room at the inn"
We were desperate and in the end our friend Hazel came up trumps - her neighbour knew of a sheep farmer who might be able to help (thanks Hazel!) and sure enough, one more phone call and Gerard the sheep farmer agreed to come and do the deed.
The date was set and Jerard came round to inspect the pigs - he told us not to feed them the day before and that he would kill them on the next Monday, let them firm up overnight and do the butchering the next day.
So all day Sunday, we avoided the pigs because they were not shy about telling us they were hungry - the noise was quite incredible and we felt really bad for not feeding them. They squealed so much that we could even hear them from inside the house.
Eventually, at 3pm on the Monday and with a temperature well below zero Jerard arrived in his tractor followed by his friend.
The trick was to get the pigs to come out of their enclosure one at a time, tie a rope around their back leg, hoist them up with the tractor so that they could be cut and the blood drained out.
This sounded like a reasonable plan and indeed was exactly what Dan had witnessed the previous year at a friends smallholding.
Now, given that the boys hadn't been fed, it really was quite easy to entice them out of their enclosure to stand by the nice big shiny tractor.
With their head in a bucket of food, they were quite oblivious to the rope being tied around their back leg.
It was at this point that Jerard's friend asked Dan for a sledgehammer - now, given that Jerard had bought his shotgun along Dan wasn't too sure what the sledgehammer was needed for - but he soon found out.
As soon as Dan had handed over the sledgehammer, Jerards friend went right up to Delboy and with one deadly blow he struck Delboy on the head and he was out like a light.
Within a matter of seconds, Delboy was hoisted up on the forks of the tractor and his throat was cut and the blood being collected.
Now while this may seem barbaric, the previous year Dan had watched this process at a nearby friends. On that occassion, they had shot the pig at point-blank range but the pig still ran around screaming for a good minute or two before finally dropping to the ground.
The method Jerards friend used meant that Delboy was dead instantly and within literally 30 seconds had had the blood drained.
Once killed, Delboy was then lowered to the ground and all his hair and top layer of skin (pigs effectively have 2 layers of skin) was burnt off.
Next, the charred layer of skin was jet washed off to reveal a bright white carcass - no matter what colour the pig is, once the top layer of hair and skin is removed they are bright white underneath.
The bright white carcass is then laid on his back and the belly is carefully sliced open and the intestines removed.
Then it's back up on the tractor again where the body is cut down the middle.
This process takes around 45 minutes to do and all the time Delboy was being killed, Rodney was more concerned with why he still hadn't been fed.
As a result, he was only too glad to follow the bucket of food to the tractor!
What astonished us most was the size of the carcass - we knew our pigs were big - in fact, we got around 140 kilos of useable meat from each one! - but when they were hanging up, they were nigh on 7 feet long!
The carcasses were left to hang in our garden shed over night so that the meat could firm up - given that the ambient temperature was below freezing there was no danger of flies buzzing around.
The following day Jerard arrived to start butchering the carcasses.
Watching Jerard turn these huge sides of pork into recognisable cuts of meat was quite awe inspiring!
We'd read a few bits before we'd had the pigs killed and knew roughly what joints of meat we wanted (a pig is such a versatile animal and there are seemingly endless ways to joint them) but what we couldn't get over was just how much meat there was.
At the time, when we bagged the meat up into family portions, we calculated that we had enough pork for over 200 meals for a minimum of 4 people! We even had to get another chest freezer for all the meat!
It was incredible - Jerard was producing meat faster than we knew what to do with. It was almost like the Disney scene of the Sourcerors Apprentice - joints of meat were coming from every direction!!!
At lunchtime, Tracey cooked the traditional liver & onion dish, served with mashed potato. Jerard joined us for lunch and was genuinely impressed with his meal.
After lunch, it was back to more butchering although progress was a lot slower - probably something to do with the bottle of brandy that Jerard had slowly drunk throughout the day to keep himself warm!!!
By early evening Jerard had finished and we thanked him profusely. He'd also taken away with him the "offcuts" and promised to make us something called "Rillettes"
We were still bemused by the amount of meat that we had piled up around us and so were not really paying that much attention and not sure what to expect. In fact, looking at the buckets of offcuts we thought he might as well feed them to his dog - but boy, were we in for a surprise!
Anyway, with Jerard gone and our friend Mark who'd been helping us also on his way home, we began the daunting task of bagging and freezing the portions of meat.
This actually took us until 1 in the morning!!! Years ago, we'd only crawl into bed in the early hours after a damn good night out on the tiles - now we were knackered after sorting out piles of pork!
The following day, Mark came back round to help Dan make the sausages. Back in his younger days, Dan's saturday job was actually at a local butchers and so going back to making sausages was like seeing Dan when he was 17 years old!
As an early Christmas present, Dans' parents had bought him a sausage making machine and we ended up making 40 kilos of sausages - in actual sausage count, that's over 700 sausages!!!
Given the huge amount of scraps to feed Delboy & Rodney we'd been given by friends and neighbours, plus the odd bath, sink and sheet metal we were only too pleased to "pay our debts" by giving pork based presents to them all.
And as for the taste - bloody amazing!!! The meat was just so tender, juicy and tasty.
Keeping Delboy & Rodney was a real milestone for us. Not only did they provided us with hours of entertainment and literally hundreds of meals, they also represented the very essence of our organic smallholding lifestyle.
Knowing where our food comes from and that it's not been grown in artificial or chemical enduced environments, and that our animals have led healthy, natural lives is of paramount importance to us.
Delboy & Rodney may be gone, but they will never be forgotten.
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