With six kids in the family, we almost never used the dining table for a formal meal. Instead, we helped ourselves directly from giant pots on the stove, then jostled for places around the kitchen counter or sat cross-legged at the coffee table to eat. My mom tried to cook a week’s worth of dinners at a time, so they’d be ready to go when she got home from work and my dad had to head to his night shift at McDonald’s.
Filipino food is built for a crowd. My mom was one of nine kids; my lola Josefina, the eldest of eleven. Our definition of immediate family includes second and third cousins and people we’ve called tito and tita for so long, we forget we’re not actually related. Everyone brings food—potluck is our way of life—and this is when the dining table finally gets its due, as the stage for a great patchwork of baking dishes and foil bins, packed edge to edge, more than we could ever eat. All day we graze, pausing between plates until hungry again, lunch blurring into dinner. The food holds up, somehow as good six hours in as it was at the start. No one is allowed to go home without leftovers.
