Slow Noodles

The title, "Slow Noodles," is an expression of Chantha’s personal philosophy in the kitchen and in life: The best dishes require extra time and love to prepare, and rebuilding a society after genocide takes generations of investment—no quick fixes.

Chantha's childhood kitchen in 1960s Battambang was a wonderland of flavors, from Khmer village fare to sumptuous French dishes. Her mother prepared meals the old-school way, grinding rice to make rice flour and cooking over a charcoal fire. To her, slower was better, and she despised the flavor of short cuts.

Chantha carries that legacy forward in her own kitchen, and has passed on those family recipes to her daughter Clara. In writing this book, she aims to pass them on to a new generation of Cambodians, thereby reviving a style of Khmer home cooking that was nearly lost to decades of war and genocide.

That "slow noodles" philosophy also extends to Chantha's life's work as a social entrepreneur. In the 1990s, as Cambodia struggled to rise from the ashes of genocide, Chantha saw how billions in international aid were often wasted on band-aid solutions that did little to help traumatized survivors relearn self-sufficiency. She co-founded the Stung Treng Women's Development Center, a nonprofit silk-weaving center, to help impoverished families along the long, difficult path toward economic self-reliance.

"I have been through poverty and back out again," she writes. "I know how to show other women how it’s done. And that has become my life’s work."