Wintermelon Soup / Canh Bí

Canh bí is another absolutely essential Vietnamese family meal soup. Similar to canh rau đay (Egyptian spinach soup) or canh sườn heo (pork sparerib soup), no home-cooked meal is complete without some soup to bring it all together.

For me, canh bí really reminds me of home because it’s my mom’s favorite soup. I credit my love of food and my ability to cook to my mom because, as a kid, whenever she cooked, I would always hover, ask her how to make things and be involved. Regardless of how annoyed she was, she’d find something to let me do. That said, though, my mom only cooked once or twice a week because she was always busy working.
So instead, what she would do is prep all the ingredients needed to cook things so that whenever we’d get hungry, we could quickly put a meal together. Because of that, I’ve been cooking for as long as I can remember.