I was cleaning out the fridge and I found some old forgotten kimchi that were too sour to eat, along with last weeks’s pineapple chunks, Thai basils, cilantro, and mung bean sprouts from phở night.

So being the typical resourceful and resilient Vietnamese daughter I was, I threw everything in a pot and made a mashup version of Vietnamese sweet and sour pineapple “canh chua” soup with the kimchi as the ”sour” component.

OH MY GOODNESS! Why haven’t I done this before? The result was a flavor marriage in heaven. The East Asian flavor of gochujang and fermented cabbage was the perfect match for the Southeast Asian tropical flavors of pineapple, Thai basils, and cilantro.

And that’s exactly how we as a people (both Vietnamese and Koreans) survived war, colonization, and famine. We were adaptable and resourceful with what we had, and most importantly, we wasted nothing.  Our destitution was the mother of our adaptation.