For most people this picture is not part of prep for Thanksgiving dinner. For a glorious few years, though, it was for my sister and I. We'd gather folks together, others like ourselves still in town for Thanksgiving weekend, and everyone would chip in for a roasted pig. The roasted meat of kings.
Jazmine and I would, of course, since we're Filipino, supplement the already adequate amount of food with other traditional dishes like longanisa, lumpia, pancit, morcon, and others. We joked that there are no sides at a Filipino meal, only an assortment of main courses. I loved these Thanksgivings. It was a holiday with no stress of travel. And while the cooking was work, it was work my sister and I were happy and kind of excited to do. It was time that was entirely about eating, drinking, and being merry, because tomorrow we would all spend the day holed up in our apartments eating leftovers and avoiding Black Friday shopping.
This picture is from our first Phanksgiving. As I chopped that pig up with a meat cleaver while the aroma of roasted pork wafted over me (one of the more satisfying culinary moments of my culinary life) I remembered birthdays growing up, listening to my dad chop up the pig in the garage with a machete. Earlier that day we'd picked it up from a farm outside of Cleveland and brought it to a bakery downtown that had a pig-sized oven. We'd go home and prep the house for the party, and return later to let that piggy scent coat the entire interior of my parents' SUV. I remember feeling... something at the knowledge that now was my turn to take steel to swine.
If I'm recalling my holidays correctly, this first year was the year my sister drank a lot of wine, passed out in her room in the middle of a phone call, and woke up at 4am to a dark, clean apartment, and a pig's head covered in saran wrap on her mantle. A true Thanksgiving if ever there was one.
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