Recipes

The word for the season…breathless! Christmas is not even a month over and Chinese New Year is upon us already. Because Chinese New Year dates depend on the lunar calendar, once in a while CNY lands a little too early in January. It’s even more exciting if Hari Raya also ends up around the same period – then we have a long celebration of Christmas-Lunar-Raya! Anyway the most common phrase I’ve been hearing is “I haven’t taken down my Christmas decorations yet!”. Last year, incongruously, Chinese New Year snacks started to appear in supermarkets at Christmas. I guess I’m breathless...

Wendell Brown sits in a Chinese prison cell. The cell is about 30 feet by 15 feet and has around 30 other men in it. While sitting there, he takes out a small sheet of paper and writes down some goals to accomplish when he is released.The paper likely looked something like this:  Start a nonprofit organization for young people.   Write a book about being imprisoned. Make a film about imprisonment.  Brown now has three nonprofit organizations.The book he wrote, NFL To Prison Cell, is available for pre-order. He currently is the strength and conditioning coach at Martin Luther King High School...

Dear Reader, Something new I’ve done this year that I’ve never done before? I baked two (from scratch) cakes! I’ve been baking bread (specifically challah for Friday night dinner) but I never was much of a baker of sweets before. I have no explanation for this, but after the first successful one, I decided to try a different recipe for guests who were coming last Friday night. Baking certainly wasn’t a New Year’s resolution, or anything like that. Which leads me to wonder, what’s new with you this new year? Let me know via reply email. See ya on the...

Enlarge / Passengers wearing face masks wait to board a high-speed railway train in Guangzhou South railway station on January 15, 2023, in Guangzhou, China. China is currently experiencing Spring Festival travel season, where millions of Chinese travel around the country before celebrating the Chinese or Lunar New Year. (credit: Getty | Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto ) China is now reporting that nearly 60,000 people had died of COVID-19 since early December when the country abruptly abandoned its zero-COVID policy and omicron subvariants began ripping through its population. The new death toll is a stark revision from China's previously reported figure for...

The other morning I recorded a podcast episode on the 5 things I’ve done so far in January to set me up for an epic year. However, since that episode has come out, I’ve done a few more things that are kind of important so I wanted to share them in blog form with you to give you a little something extra. you can listen to episode 231: 5 things to do in January for your best year on the blissfully ambitious podcast here. I am just going to start out by saying dry January isn’t one of the things...