The whole hog!

With every new year comes a new set of challenges and goals.  Some people even set themselves New Years Resolutions*.  I was in the market for a challenge but I couldn't think what to do.  In November 2010 I started writing a food blog, Tonight's Menu, an almost daily diary of the food I cook at home.  The challenge wasn't to keep a food diary or to widen my culinary horizons but to see if I could improve my written English.  Over the course of almost three hundred posts, I think I have managed to do just that.

Half way through writing Tonight's Menu another challenge appeared in the shape of the Olympic Food Challenge.  The Olympics were everywhere you turned last summer.  I thought it would be interesting to see if you could eat a national dish from all of the participating nations.  With the help of eleven intrepid food bloggers** we just about made it to the finishing line.

Then, this afternoon, out of the blue, a tweet caught my eye.

"I want to do an eating challenge this year"

Without stopping to check my tweet for typing errors I suggested that they should eat an entire pig over the course of the year.  It then dawned on me that they were after more of a Man vs Food type challenge but by then I had started thinking.  For a long time I have held the belief that if you are willing to eat meat you should be willing to eat every part of the animal that laid down its life for you. 

Nose to tail eating, including the squidgy bits, is something I aspire to but not something that I'm evangelical about.  Until the Olympic Food Challenge I hadn't eaten pigs trotters.  Liver tends to be kept for pate.  Black pudding is a must for a full English but after that, I have a lot of ground to make up and a lot of bits to eat.  I'm planning, over the course of 2013 to eat everything that a pig has to offer, from the snout to the tail and everything in between.  I do not intend to eat an entire pig, however, as I already consume a fair amount of chops, bacon and sausages I may well do that anyway.

So cute I could eat them!

I can see some stumbling blocks ahead.  I know that I do not own a pan large enough to cook a pig's head in, I'm not sure if I'm ready to try trotters again and I have absolutely no idea where to buy testicles in Leeds.  If you have the answers to any of these problems, please let me know.  If you just want to know how I'm getting on, come back soon.

*In 2000 I resolved never to make any more New Year Resolutions, to date this is the only resolution I have ever kept.
** Two hundred and four Nations took part in London 2012, there was no way that I could have achieved that on my own.