Party Foods

Then stick in a piece of garlic, do this again and again until you run out of garlic or wild boar bits to stick garlic into.

There you have it, a whole baby boar, butterflied and ready to be cooked.

Lay down a double layer of foil on the ground where you build this and you (or your wife's) clean-up will be easier.  Then just stack the blocks, three long and two wide, or bigger if you've got something bigger to cook.  Then cover all the inside with foil, this is not really necessary but it will trap more heat and make your oven more efficient.  If you are feeling handy you can build grill supports into it, but cinder blocks standing on end worked just fine to hold up the grates that we had laying around.

Don't use all your charcoal at this step but you do want to make a fairly large and hot fire to preheat the oven.  Then, once the charcoal is nicely lit, split the coals up four ways and rake them into the corners.  This way you can cook with indirect heat, it is pretty important to remember this part, if you try to cooks something big in your oven directly over the top of a bunch of hot coals you will end up with your drippings igniting a helluva grease fire and whatever your are trying to cook will get burnt beyond repair.

At this point it is a good idea to add a few briquettes to each of your four fires, if you want to throw in some smoking chips now would be a good time for that as well.  Your life will be easier if you have left a little space between the grill and the corners of the oven.

If you were planning ahead, you might have left a brick on each corner jutting out just a bit.  That way you can vent a little oxygen into each corner to keep the heat up, or close them off if it gets too hot.

You can also use a hair dryer to blow some air into your vents to quickly raise the temperature or help ignite some new charcoal if you need to reload.  For the oven pictured above I used about 6 kilos of regular charcoal and about half of a 15 kilo bag of mame tan, I got it really hot then left it alone for two and a half hours, at which point I thought about flipping the pig, decided it was too much trouble, then let it cook for 30 more unnecessary minutes.  There was still another couple of hours worth of heat left in the coals and the oven should I have needed more cooking time.  You can easily get 4-5 hours out of one load of charcoal, then you need to start reloading every three hours or so if you are cooking something huge.
Now there should be a picture of something beautiful coming out of the oven, but I forgot to take that picture.  Maybe next time.
Happy Cooking!