A few weeks ago Carole and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. To commemorate the event we had a backyard shindig with 58 guests including family members travelling from both ends of the country, Vancouver and St. John’s, to join in and partake of great BBQ and cold beer. While it was great to have everyone over and enjoy the great weather one of the highlights for me was preparing a feast that included gravlax on cucumber slices, duck confit lettuce wraps with apple maple slaw, and for the main course a whole roast lamb from The Kupecz family farm in Stirling Ontario served with duck fat roast potatoes, lemon herb chick pea salad and mixed greens.
Farmer Larry Kupecz is doing some interesting things on his pesticide and hormone free farm including kasu fed lamb. Kasu is the by-product of saki production and is often used in Japaneese cuisine. Larry’s kasu fed lamb were featured on the Toronto Star series Sourced.
Larry himself has chosen farming as a second career and was the subject of a video created by one of my students in first-year multi-media production course at Loyalist College. Nakita Krucker did a great job shooting and editing this short feature on Larry and his farm take a look.
The preparations for the BBQ started the week before laying out bricks to place the spit on.
The spit and motor were purchased online from Spitjack and the quality of the product was outstanding. The model I purchased is rated for 55 pounds and it handled the 30-pound lamb without a hitch. The owner of the company talked me through the brick setup. I used lump charcoal for the heat and ignited it with two Weber Rapid-Fire chimney starters to keep adding heat as required.
Of course I had to test out the set-up in advance and cooked what will be forever known as test pork!
In a nutshell the Lamb was a hit and disappeared into the lucky bellies of our guests in no time. We had a ton of fun and really are grateful to have so many folks travel out to celebrate with us.
Here is a Timelapse we made during our fun backyard shindig. Much of which was shot by my new photography assitants Madeleine and Julia Tetford.