How to do Greek Easter in England

Did you all have a good Easter? I certainly did, complete with full roasting lamb. Let's not examine the fact that in England you can't buy a lamb with the head attached. You can buy the head separately and do what you wish with it. And thus on Easter two little lamb souls were watching from heaven and shaking their heads at the indignity of being roasted attached to someone else's head/body.

You don't get the huge roasting gear in England so I had to order it from a scrap metal company. I had made the appropriate phonecalls from Athens and located one that was willing to do it for me, and so off I went to draw them what I wanted, boldly asserting that the roasting stick had to be at least 2 metres 20. It went something like this:

"Are you sure you want it that big?"

"Yeah, it's got to be, I'm roasting a whole lamb"

When I turn up for collection my eyes pop out of my head when I see just how big 2 metres 20 is.

"It's uh... a bit big"

"You asked for it to be this big"

"Yeah I know"

No need to worry, it was just the perfect size. Greeks everywhere, be proud of me, this little South Asian who managed to order lamb-roasting gear in a small English town and get the proportions exactly correct.

In Greek Easter, size is everything. And so on Saturday it was off to the Arab butchers in Birmingham to buy our full lamb. They let Mr Zeus and my mum walk into the meat freezer to pick it for themselves and then he found a head that matched up nicely. Armed with our booty, we headed off for the preparations.

On Sunday about 15 of my cousins, aunties, uncles and friends turned up and howled with delight when they realised "Come over for some roasted lamb" meant literally an entire roasted lamb. There was lots of curtain twitching as curious neighbours wondered what their nut-case exotic neighbours were up to now. We had lifted some slabs out of the patio to make a fully fledged roasting pit, and faced with a barbecue of such epic proportions, no one else in the neighbourhood attempted to wheel out their little grills and face total humiliation.

It was a total success. Thank you, Greece, for transforming Easter from a boring Sunday trying to catch something interesting on TV into the party of the year. Jesus would have been most proud that you got a whole gang of non-Christians in on the act.

Image: From http://jan.moesen.nu/media/photos/2004/07/jhx-kernweekend-in-houffalize/20040710-barbecue-1.jpg