Pig Roast Honduras

In your opinion, what is the most romantic way to spend Valentine's Day?  Relaxing with your sugar muffin on a deserted beach while eating mussels and sipping wine?  Lounging with your sweet cheeks by a roaring fire in a private ski lodge?  Or partying with a bunch of good friends drinking Imperiales while you wait for a 200lb pig buried under your feet to cook through for your belly's delight?  If the latter fell more in line with your answer, then you are invited to the first annual Valentine's Day Pig Roast in Honduras!

Oh, hey there!

One of the things I was more upset about leaving behind in the USA was an annual pig roast tradition that a few friends and I have partaken in since 2006.  In September of that year, Landon, Matt, and I held a pig roast as a fundraiser for the Tsunami Volunteer Center, an organization I worked with for a month and a half in southern Thailand.  We followed that up the next year with a fundraiser for our local Habitat for Humanity chapter.  After two successful and fun parties of our own, we decided to call it a day and enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor instead.  Some of Landon's friends stepped it up a level and rented out a campground in western Virginia and we had a lot of fun jamming out to live bluegrass while devouring delicious roast piggie, in 2009 and 2010.

Well, there are pigs down here, plenty of people with musical instruments, several similar tasting beers in differently labeled bottles, and excuses needed to be made for Peace Corps reunions.  After several conversations during training with my fellow PCV Jacob, who brews his own beer and makes his own pancetta (he talked his wife into allowing him to hang dry it above their bed in their small NY apartment), a new tradition was born.  He recently scoured the depths of the internet for a fairly easy, straightforward method of cooking an entire pig, minus the luxuries of a spit or a car-towed pig-sized grill.  He decided our best bet would be to slow roast it underground, just like this person has done on several occasions.  The materials and labor are easy to come by, there's no better way to work up an appetite than by digging a massive pit and preparing your own food.  And waiting with beer after beer in hand for 12 hours.  Below is Jacob's rendition of the cooking process:

Laughably realistic as to how it will all probably go down

Scene from the original roast

Besides the pig, there will also be a bake-off, headlined by Tiffany and Jessica!  Talk of red velvet cupcakes, chocolate volcano cake, blueberry cobbler, and a number of other delicacies make me wish Valentine's Day was tomorrow...  After 37 straight days of different combinations of the same ingredients (beans, tortillas, rice, cheese, etc), you might be able to understand why we have dived right into this project.  Details still to come (the location of the fiesta will not be disclosed here due to security reasons) but I wanted to get the word out early in case any of you folks abroad wanted to time a trip to Central America with the pig roast of the decade!

Any suggestions on techniques, obligatory side dishes, home brews, and the like are highly welcomed and encouraged.