He has rested and risen; now he’s getting ready to EAT!

Need I say that the heart of every Greek holiday (not unlike just about every other culture I can think of) is the FOOD?!  Last night, about the time Ken and I headed to bed, our hosts went to church for the obligatory midnight moment: HE IS RISEN!  

That done, they came home to eat a huge meal.  (We are told some of the older folks actually fast most of the day.  For many others, “fast” is a relative term that, if applicable at all, describes having given up such things as meat, oil, sugar, etc.— not necessarily all of those nor for the entire Lenten period, which in Greece can extend to as much as 49 days, depending on particulars of the calendar we didn’t follow).

Today, Sunday, is going to be the traditional Easter bash, which means days of advance preparation.  In this case, it also means roasting an entire baby goat (our friends had lots of fun with the double meaning in English of “kid”).  Here's a few videos of the process.  NOTE VEGETARIANS PROBABLY DO NOT WANT TO VIEW THESE.

In addition to roasting the kid, our hosts made a traditional dish that Ken, my farm-raised sweetheart, looked forward to in a big way. Suffice it to say that I don’t eat “parts”—not even when they are all skewered together (heart, liver, stomach, lung, and a few other things I don’t remember) and then cocooned in intestine and roasted on a spit. (Yum?) I did, however, take a lot of videos of the process of preparing the goat and the. . . other dish.  Anyone so inclined is welcome to try this at home.  (Let me know how it worked for you.)

Here's "Greek Home Kitchen" demonstration of making "kokoretsi" (my best attempt at a transliteration):

Post script: Just as those of us who had spent the night (or live) in Sparti arrived at the farm, the metal spit--on which the goat had been rotisserie-ing for less than an hour--broke! The men-folk spent some time trying to improvise a splint with a thinner metal rod but even though they got it all the way through, the new setup clearly wasn't going to turn for the several hours required.  (It was binding somewhere inside the goat and the motor that turned the spit was laboring.)  

So they performed "surgery," cutting the goat into roaster pan sized pieces that could fit in the oven, and cooking resumed.