We better make a move, Philip Paculaba has decided, as the sky gets even blacker. The men work together, shifting the lechon with the steel-lined bed of burning charcoal deeper into the cover of a weathered tarp strung between the bunkie and a birch tree.
When a support stand starts to tip, two of the guys lunge and catch the spit before it can hit the ground. “Even with this janky setup,” announces one, “nothing stops the lechon!” Not even this rain, which is churning the flat surface of Kahshe Lake, Ont., into matte grey felt. With no wind at all, the clouds above stop moving, and we wait as they empty out.
While Philip pokes at the coals, his sister Rose arrives. She extends her golf umbrella over Philip, gracefully deflecting a persistent drip that’s found a hole in the tarp. Rose has come to check on the ears, wrapped now in foil. They are her favourite part of the pig, and as the eldest auntie here, she has dibs.
The aunties—sisters Rose, Dylin, Cora, and Carmel—and the two brothers, Philip and Jun, and their families, are being hosted by second-youngest sister Farah Rueck and her husband, Mike, for the annual Paculaba family cottage reunion. By the time all the children, grandchildren, and partners arrive at the Rueck cottage, there will be at least 30 people here, spanning about seven decades in age. All the beds, all the couches, and a small settlement of tents behind the bunkie will be full.
Farah’s extended family has been coming up to the cottage for this weekend every year—pandemic excepted—since the early 2000s, about the time Mike and Farah took over from his parents. The log cottage sits high on the steep shore, behind heavy tree cover that hides most of the building except for the new metal roof. “I’m getting used to the roof,” says Farah, laughing. “When we picked the colour, I didn’t realize it would be quite that red.”
Although the couple built the current cottage to replace the ’50s original that Mike’s parents built, the reminders of them are still there, in the needlework hangings with German proverbs and the “Oma’s Kitchen” sign (near the newer “Welcome to Farahdise” sign). Outside, his mother’s lovage plant is growing tall at the foot of the stairs. “We call it ‘Maggi’ for the German name Maggikraut,” says Mike. “We don’t cook with it often, but it’s been here at least 30 years.” The black-eyed Susans nearby, transplants from Farah’s mother’s garden, are thriving too.
A few years after Mike’s parents immigrated to Toronto from West Berlin in 1956, his father unfolded a map, grabbed a compass, and drew an arc centred on the intersection of Davenport and Symington. “My dad wanted to build a cottage about an hour-and-a-half drive from home, and the line happened to run through Kahshe Lake.” The shallow and complex lake at the southern edge of Muskoka is a cross-hatched scribble on the map, with channels, bays, islands, and hidden—occasionally deadly—hazards for speeding boats.
Mike’s own pontoon boat has been in slow and steady use this weekend, ferrying guests in from the boat launch across the lake. He picked up Philip, more family members, and the lechon early Saturday morning. Food, according to Mike, is the organizing principle of his wife’s family weekends: “You can’t have a Filipino celebration without a pig roast and lots of food. Even while you’re eating, someone is starting to cook the next meal.” This weekend, Philip ordered the dressed pig and drove it up; other years Mike has brought one. Is it hard to find? “With a few days’ notice, I think any butcher can get one,” Mike says. “There’s an independent butcher at the Food Basics near us. That’s where I usually go.”
When Austronesian peoples moved south from Taiwan to the Philippines, about 4,000 years ago, they were not the first to arrive, but they were the first to bring domesticated pigs. The word “lechon,” meaning suckling pig, arrived later, with Spanish colonizers in the 16th century—but the cooking technique likely predates colonization. Pigs are charcoal-roasted on bamboo spits throughout the islands, Rose explains, especially for festivals to celebrate each town’s patron saint. “Personally, I’d rather have fresh seafood for a special meal. But in the Philippines, that’s everyday food.”
The lechon arrived at the cottage long before the rain started. When the pig came off the boat, Philip and his nephew Ardie carried it on a large metal tray up to the round patio table. There, Philip scored the meat and scattered a handful of coarse sea salt overtop, although, “it’s better to salt it the night before, if you can.” Next, he packed in two bulbs’ worth of whole garlic cloves, a dozen crushed stalks of lemongrass, twice as many green onions, and four generous bunches of mint.
Once the pig was stuffed with the aromatics, Philip used a clean awl to poke holes on either side of the open belly. The spit was centred next, poking out through the pig’s mouth and laid on top of the onions and lemongrass. Philip tried to delegate the sewing to Gerard, also known as G, but he objected: “I’m not the right kind of nurse. My wife’s the surgical nurse. She could do it.” Philip threaded butcher’s twine in a skewer-sized semi-circular needle and began working it in and out of the thick skin.
Mint is unusual in Filipino cooking, Philip says. “I tried it after it escaped from the garden at home. Now, it makes my lechon special.” He reassures us, in his dad-joke voice, that another novel ingredient has made this pork low-cholesterol: “The butcher told me they feed the pigs Lipitor.” The lemongrass and the green onions, though, are typical for lechon cooked in Cebu, the island province in the Visayas island group, in the middle of all the other islands of the Philippines. The Paculaba siblings are from that part of the country, and they are very clear about where the best lechon is roasted. It’s definitely not, they say, up north in Manila.
Aside from his roots in Cebu, Philip claims no special training in roasting lechon—he’d watched it so often in the Philippines, he decided to try it in his suburban backyard. With practice, he’s become the family lechon master. Even so, “the aunties will come over soon to tell him what he should be doing instead,” Mike jokes, in a stage whisper. “So they can take credit too.”
And right on cue, Rose arrives. Sunglasses perched on her head, hair pulled back in a flamboyant floral scrunchie, this adventurous and spontaneous matriarch is clearly in charge of the fun this weekend. The first of the Paculaba family to emigrate to Canada, in 1971, she was also the first woman to move into stock trading at Manulife Insurance. “They wanted to pay me less than the men,” she says. “But I’d been working in payroll. I knew exactly how much I should get, and I negotiated hard.”
She tells the story of how, new to Toronto, she hopped into the back of what she thought was a yellow taxi. “I was impressed that cab drivers in Canada wore uniforms. And this one was very handsome.” She soon realized he was a police officer—“The car was the same colour as cabs in the Philippines!”
A few years later, in 1979, a teenaged Farah arrived in Canada with Philip, Carmel, and their parents. A few more years after that, she met Mike when he was visiting his brother in the office tower where she worked. “Mike came in wearing cut-off shorts and a tank top, and he had incredibly beautiful, shoulder-length blond hair. I thought he was brazen,” she says.
“And I thought she was taller,” Mike responds. “Turns out she was wearing four-inch heels.”
By midday, the worst of the rain has cleared, and Philip’s lechon duties have settled into a routine. For a few more hours, he’ll continue to watch over it, adding charcoal as needed and mopping the skin regularly with water. Too much heat and the skin will split, letting moisture out; if it gets too cool, the skin won’t be crisp.
The hustle now moves inside to the small cottage kitchen, where as many as seven cooks are dancing around each other, getting everything else ready for the family dinner. Bowls are the item in highest demand—they get rinsed, passed overhead, and reused as soon as they’re empty. Pots become temporary bowls. Search requests get lobbed to Farah, who finds more bowls, deep in a cupboard, before she’s briefly stumped by another question. “If I was flour,” she asks herself, stopping in the middle of all the action, “where would I be?”
At the smaller dining table, seven of the younger Paculaba clan, in their twenties and thirties, gather. They’ve been assigned the job of making lumpia, bite-sized Filipino spring rolls typically filled with ground meat, red peppers, onion, and garlic—but only one person in the group has folded them before. G provided the filling recipe, which came from his father, and he demonstrates for the rest, taking a small spoonful of the mixture from a Tupperware container, spreading it on a wrapper, then folding over the corners into a neat thumb-sized cylinder.
After a few badly stuffed first attempts, everyone settles into a rhythm of measuring, spreading, folding, and sealing. There’s some gossip about an acquaintance who is “a bit OA”—Filipino slang for “over-acting,” as in attention-seeking. A question about verb conjugation in Cebuano gets yelled over to the aunties. Forty minutes later, almost 200 lumpia are neatly stacked, ready to be deep-fried outside.
When the grandchildren see the aunties placing flat, shiny leaves on the dining table in the enclosed porch, the cry goes out: “We’re having a boodle fight!” A boodle fight is a Filipino group feast where food is laid directly on banana leaves and everyone takes what they want—like a buffet with hardly any serving dishes. Philip and his helpers bring the lechon in and set it down to rest. The kitchen crew spoon concentric berms of rice and stir-fried noodles around the pig. A few bowls appear: peanut-thickened kare kare stew, fermented shrimp sauce, and Rose’s atzara, a sweet-and-sour pickle of julienned vegetables and green papaya. All the other foods—the deep-fried lumpia, half-cobs of steamed corn, fried fish, skewers of grilled chicken strips, mangoes, watermelon slices, and half-moons of papaya—are arranged directly on the banana leaves.
Everyone, whether they’ve been in the kitchen or the lake, assembles around the table, with spillover into the cottage and on the deck. It’s quiet for a few moments as Auntie Rose says grace, and then everyone digs in. Philip carves the lechon, which is fragrant with lemongrass and mint and has acquired a mango in its mouth. The deep red-brown skin is broken into pieces, so everyone gets some, and Rose takes an ear.
In a traditional boodle fight—which has roots in communal dinners and Filipino military life—we would sit around the table and eat with our fingers. This table isn’t big enough, so we use paper plates. Everyone disperses around the cottage to eat—some sitting on the stairs, some perched on couch arms or seated on the floor.
After everyone comes back for seconds—or thirds—there’s a flurry of putting food away to make room for a large sheet cake. Dylin, second-oldest of the aunties, is turning 75, but there are at least four other family members who also get a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” The crowd attempts to keep each round special, singing at different tempos, adding claps, or twisting the mylar balloons shaped as seven and five to form other numbers. The smallest of the children look confused, but they are quickly learning to embrace a little family chaos.
There’s a long wind-down as everyone relaxes after dinner. One group gets the dishes out of the way, while Mike lights a campfire beside the lake. When Mike asks his grandson how brown his marshmallow should be, Jack doesn’t have a strong opinion, he just wants another one.
Around 11 p.m., the fire is almost out, and the call goes out to assemble for the meteor shower—a quick check with Google has confirmed that this weekend is peak Perseids. About a dozen gather on the dock between Mike’s pontoon boat and his brother-in-law Mario’s duck boat. All the Paculaba generations are represented. The youngest are a little confused again, not sure what to look for in the dark. The teen boys are goofing around in the back of the group. The adults are quiet.
Soon, Auntie Rose is swaying in a gentle dance, moving her head a bit, and advising everyone to use their peripheral vision. “Don’t stare,” she tells the younger ones. “Just let the meteors come into your eyes.” This night, Rose says, reminds her of touring a mountain observatory in the Canary Islands with Dylin. “I felt so close to the stars that night, like we were only a foot or two away,” she says softly. “Tonight, we’re almost that close.”
Martin Zibauer is Cottage Life’s contributing editor. He roasted pork belly six times for this story, ostensibly to get the recipe right.
This story originally appeared in our August ’24 issue.
Lechon-Style Pork Belly
Martin Zibauer
Barbecuing a whole pig is a lot. For a more manageable feast, try roasting pork belly—with a herb paste inspired by Philip's lechon—for a delicious balance of crisp skin and moist meat slow-roasted in its own rendered fat.
Course dinner
Cuisine Filipino
- 1.5 kg (3 lbs) skin-on pork belly
- 2 tsp salt
- 3 stalks lemongrass
- 1 small onion roughly chopped
- 6 green onions roughly chopped
- 6 cloves garlic roughly chopped
- 1 bunch mint stems removed (about 1 cup leaves)
- ½ tsp ground pepper
Using a sharp knife or a corn cob holder, poke pork belly skin all over—about 1 cm apart and about 5 mm deep.
Bring about 1 cm of water to a simmer in a large frying pan. Place pork belly in pan, skin-side down, and simmer for 2 minutes. Transfer to a cutting board. Dry all sides with paper towel. Make a few cuts, about 1 cm deep and 2 cm apart, in flesh side. Rub salt into meat and skin.
Refrigerate, skin-side up and uncovered, for up to 24 hours to help the skin crisp.
Prepare lemongrass by removing tough outer leaves and trimming about 2 cm off the root end. Thinly slice about 15 cm of each stalk, stopping where the inner stalk becomes green and dry.
In a food processor, pulse lemongrass, onion, green onions, garlic, mint, and pepper to make a rough paste. Spread paste over flesh side of pork belly.
Place pork belly, skin-side up, on foil. Fold foil edges up and back, so sides are tightly covered but skin is exposed. Place skin-side up on a wire rack in a roasting pan, and cook in a 325°F oven until internal temperature reaches 175°F–185°F, about 3 hours. Reposition oven rack so the belly is about 8–10 cm from the broiler. Broil, turning the roasting pan frequently, until skin begins to puff slightly and brown. Remove and let rest for 10 minutes before serving.
TO BARBECUE: Set up barbecue for indirect cooking and preheat to 325°F. Place foil-wrapped belly on unheated side and close lid. Cook until internal temperature reaches 175°F–185°F, about 3 hours. Flip pork belly, remove foil, and cook skin-side down over direct heat, until skin begins to puff and brown. Remove and let rest 10 minutes before serving.
The last few minutes of cooking the pork belly are the most critical; under the broiler, the skin can burn very easily. The same goes for the lechon, which is why Philip must constantly wipe the skin with water. “The Paculaba sisters are a tough bunch,” says Farah. “The skin has to be crisp and crackling.”
Keyword grilling, pig roast, pork
Chicken Adobo
Martin Zibauer
Every Filipino household has a slightly different recipe for this everyday stew. Ardie, Philip's nephew, uses lemon juice to brighten his version.
Course dinner
Cuisine Filipino
- 1 kg chicken parts skin removed
- ⅓ cup soy sauce
- ⅓ cup vinegar
- 4 cloves garlic crushed
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 tsp brown sugar
- 1 tsp black peppercorns
In a large, non-reactive bowl, combine all ingredients. Refrigerate, covered, for 3 hours or up to overnight.
In a large pot over medium heat, bring chicken mixture to a simmer. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. Remove bay leaves. Continue simmering, uncovered, until sauce thickens and chicken is tender, about 20 minutes.
Serve with steamed rice or garlic fried rice.
Atzara
Martin Zibauer
This sweet-and-sour mix of quick-pickled vegetables is a versatile accompaniment, served alongside rice and fried foods.
Course Side Dish
Cuisine Filipino
- ¾ cups vinegar
- ¼ cup apple cider vinegar
- ¼ cup sugar
- ½ tsp salt
- ½ medium green papaya about 350 g, julienned
- 1 small carrot julienned
- ½ jicama or chayote julienned
- 1 cup small cauliflower florets
- 1 small onion thinly sliced
- 1 garlic clove thinly sliced
- ½ red pepper thinly sliced
In a medium saucepan, heat the vinegars, sugar, and salt. Keep stirring until the sugar has fully dissolved.
In a large bowl, toss vegetables together. Pack into jars, pour vinegar mixture overtop to cover, and refrigerate. Atzara keeps for several weeks in the refrigerator.
Green papayas (a.k.a. cooking papayas) are available at most Asian grocers. You can use a papaya that is starting to turn orange and is still hard, but avoid a soft, ripe papaya.
Garlic Fried Rice
Martin Zibauer
Simple and tasty, fried rice with fragrant, caramelized garlic pieces is typical of everyday Filipino meals. Cook the rice the day before; chilled leftover rice is essential for any fried rice dish.
Course Side Dish
Cuisine Filipino
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil
- 6-8 cloves garlic finely chopped
- 2 cups leftover cooked rice
- salt and pepper to taste
In a wok or large, heavy-bottomed frying pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until the garlic just begins to turn golden.
Add the rice. Cook, stirring, until the rice is heated through and smells lightly toasted. Season to taste.
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