Filipino Christmas Day Lunch

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We don’t normally serve a lot of food during Noche Buena because there’s always more dishes to stuff ourselves with during lunch with our relatives on Christmas day. This year we served pancit bam-i, chicken macaroni salad, pochero, and everyone’s favorite holiday dish – lechon paella. (Well everyone, that is, except for those in the family who are vegetarians or allergic to seafood.)

Since an entire lechon paella is quite expensive (to put things into perspective: for the price of the smallest lechon, you can get yourself a 500GB external hard drive), we only order one on Christmastime. I’m not actually a very big lechon person but its seafood paella was just as mouthwatering as I remembered. It has this rich, smoky taste from the lechon-roasting, and the grainy rice captured all the flavors from the seafood ingredients.

The best part about the lechon paella is that it’s so huge, and there aren’t that many of us in the family, even if you include cousins and aunts and uncles. Which means that there is always a lot of paella and lechon left over.

My vegetarian aunt couldn’t eat most of the food we prepared, so she brought over some kilawin sa puso ng saging and fish dumplings.

For dessert, we had homemade apple pie a la mode (which I helped make). My mom prepared two pies and by the end of the day, everyone devoured a pie and a half.

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