A coastal kitchen in Nha Trang

I'm Hương — a full-time home cook in Nha Trang, on the central coast of Việt Nam. I'm not a chef. I learned the way most Vietnamese cooks do: standing at my mother's elbow, then my grandmother's, watching the broth, tasting the nước chấm, learning by the hand and the nose more than by any written recipe.

Mom's Taste exists because those recipes were never written down. They lived in the cooking — in how long the bones simmered, how dark the caramel went, how much fish sauce was "enough." When friends abroad started asking how to make the food they missed, I realized that if I didn't write it down, a whole way of cooking might quietly disappear.

So this is me writing it down: real regional home cooking, photographed on my own table, tested until it tastes like home. I lean hardest into Central Vietnamese food — the cooking I grew up on, and the part of our cuisine the rest of the world knows least.

Everything here is cooked in a real kitchen, with ingredients you can actually buy. Where I recommend a bottle of fish sauce or a clay pot, it's the one I reach for myself. Pull up a stool.