No Piggin' Way!

I had a guinea pig once. He was called Oswald. We acquired him from a work colleague of my mum's, who had many animals and felt she couldn't look after them all when her daughter left for university. The guinea pig pictured here is not Oswald, however. I never dressed him in a tutu, but had I been aware of the existence of this website:

http://cuddlycavies.homestead.com/costumes.html

I might well have done... or a nurse, or a cowboy, or, well, the possibilities are endless!

Anyway, poor Oswald led a happy life in our garden until he got eaten by a fox (or so we assume), towards the end of my second year at university. I didn't find out about this until a couple of weeks after it happened as I was in the middle of exams at the time and my parents didn't want to upset me in case I then failed. This, here, is Oswald.

Cute, wasn't he? Kind of like a black blob, with a few ginger bits that you can't see in the pic as it was taken at night. The reason for the topic of today's post is that in three days time I am off to Peru, where one of their national dishes is cuy, which is roasted guinea pig. I'm not sure how I feel about the prospect of chowing down on Oswald's cousin, and my mum has told me I'm not allowed to eat one (although I'm kind of too old for her to do that these days). I'm not someone who has any vegetarian tendencies, my main rule for meat is that I will not eat any organs that I have dissected or operated on (in humans) but anything else is fair game. Veal, ostrich, kangaroo and alligator have all made it past my lips, and I'll admit also that when I was in China we would have eaten dog if it had been the right season (never managed to find the street hawker speciality of rat-on-a-stick, though). So I guess if I am presented with a roasted rodent, I'll have to give it a go. Tastes like rabbit, apparently. And further food for thought is that in churches in Lima and Cusco, the paintings depicting the Last Supper show Jesus and the twelve disciples dining on roasted guinea pig - and if it's good enough for Him...