“This fridge is packed!” Chris said earlier this week after opening our fridge and inspecting the contents. “Are these all just ingredients, or is this stuff we can actually eat?”

Our fridge usually has a lot of food in it, but oftentimes, it’s mostly raw fruit and vegetables, condiments and sauces (homemade and store-bought), different milks, yogurt, and Chris’s stockpiling of kombucha. This week, though, since I just emptied out my vegetable scrap and bone bag from the freezer, we have a lot of jars of my homemade, gelatinous stock, aka bone broth. I can assure you that this is most definitely “bone broth” — it jiggles with so much collagen that it’s almost like jell-o after cooled in the fridge.

I originally was going to use the bulk of it for a butternut squash green curry soup, but then Chris insisted that we have chicken green curry this week, and I didn’t want to double up on the green curry flavorings because it would be redundant. I had to noodle around in my endless recipe bookmarks to come up with inspiration because I couldn’t readily come up with any ideas on my own that would be simple. Since I am trying to use up what we have and not buy anything net-new unless it’s a fruit or vegetable given our remaining time here in 2025 is so limited, I need to focus on what I already have, whether it’s in the fridge, freezer, or pantry. So I decided to pivot to something lighter and quicker: Vietnamese butternut squash soup with ground pork, also known as canh bi do nau thit bam. More traditionally, the squash would be kabocha, but I just cut up my big 4.5-pound butternut squash, so I used that. I defrosted a bit of ground pork and tossed that in with aromatics before adding the butternut squash cubes and the gelatinous stock. I guess what really makes this “Vietnamese” is that it’s seasoned with fish sauce and then finished with chopped cilantro, and a lot of it.

The art and appreciation of cooking seems to be dying in my generation. People like my friend in New Jersey and I are like rare breeds. We value homemade, from scratch, from source foods. We view the time we invest into cooking as time invested in our overall health, well-being, and happiness. We don’t look at ready-made or restaurant food as better or superior. This soup is humble, but it’s satisfying, tasty, and homely. We need more of this kind of dish in our lives.