A Brownian Walk Through Life...

I read an awesome book recently. I picked it up at my local library and quite by chance, I would add. Many years ago there used to be a bookstore, a branch of Borders, within a mile of our house. It was my favorite place to spend Sunday afternoons.. browsing through the artfully curated tables of books and pre-reading many of them in a comfy leather chair. Borders closed all their physical stores since then. I still miss the convenience and experience of it so much! I feel a well stocked local library is the next best thing. What I like the most about our library (and Borders!) is the serendipity of finding a book you wouldn't have known, let alone picked otherwise and once in a while feeling like you found a true gem! This is how I feel about this book, Everyday Dharma: 8 essential practices for finding joy in everything you do by Suneel Gupta. I usually don't go for any self-help books, but something about the book and the summary (specifically it's …

Fall is my favorite season 🍂 , right up there with the spring. I love the chill in the air foreshadowing the cold winter days; lazy weekends spent dreaming of Christmas, huddled with a warm cup of tea or freshly baked cookies getting lost in an awesome mystery book (or two!). I love all the small little things from driving home in the rainy evenings, taking in the sights of tinsel lights adorning the houses, even that incessant Christmas music blaring non-stop on the radio 😂 --- but most of all, the thing I love most about the fall is the dance of vibrant show of colors in our garden!  We are fortunate to have a house lined with a variety of mature Japanese maples and other trees which adorn themselves with absolutely gorgeous yellows, reds and orange hues these few weeks of the year. It's so gorgeous and uplifting to look out the windows and see the nature at it's absolute best...  It also reminds me that like all the beautiful things worth chasing in li…

As much as I don't want to believe it's been a year since I last posted, I totally can believe that :) This year has so far been one of the uber crazy ones filled with hectic work schedules, family events and lots of travel (largely business but also personal). Without boring you with all the details, I can safely say that I am looking forward to the Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks to give me some much needed R&R - breather to slow down, spend some time with family and friends and get back into the kitchen, even if just for a little bit! I have largely taken a hiatus from daily cooking (thanks to my husband who has picked up the mantle better than I could have!), the travel this year led to some really awesome and memorable meals and connections over food. I enjoyed lots and lots of fresh seafood and guava during multiple trips to Taiwan; and ate some really awesome fish preparations and sushi while visiting Japan!  Simple sea salt roasted fish with mi…

I wish you all a very very happy holidays this year! Holidays to me is that treasured end of the year time to spend with family and friends, relaxing with good food, good books/movies and of-course a steaming hot cup of tea or coffee and something sweet to nibble along :) The holiday week is not complete for us without loads of baking. Every year my daughter and I make dozens of cookies of various varieties and spend a couple of afternoons decorating them with personalized patterns and send them as gifts to her teachers, friends and neighbors. This year we chose sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies and almond snowball cookies !  Of these, I must say the snowball cookies were our favorites - they were very nutty, melt in your mouth types with a distinct almond flavor enhanced with a good quality almond extract. We'll be making them more throughout the year for sure! Now that my daughter is 11, she takes charge of decorating the cookies. She decorated most of ours …

As I am about to welcome the last week of 2022, I am thinking to myself, how did this year fly by SO fast! This year I found myself having less and less time for cooking, instead I had my fill of the kitchen fun on weekends and those special days when we were entertaining dinner guests. I did however travel a lot (mostly for work but also some long overdue personal visits) and read a lot.  Reading has been particularly satisfying this year as I happened to hit upon an eclectic collection of highly satisfying books. I also tried to hit the local bookstores wherever I traveled internationally and stuffed a paperback in the side pocket of my luggage so I always had an interesting story to get lost into on those long airplane rides :) As I look back at the year, these are my year's personal best reads - mostly the books I read but also one or two which my daughter read or made me co-read 😃 which we both thoroughly enjoyed! First off I found myself fully engorssed …

Hello all, it has been a long time!! I have been meaning to post for a while, but life has been busy... I am spending a lot of time scrounging for recipes and reading other blogs, but truth be told, I have not been cooking as much as I would like these days. Work has taken up a lot for the time being, so my time in the kitchen has been limited to the precious weekends. However, I have been reading a bunch of good books (more on that later) and doing interesting summer crafts with my daughter. As you may have noticed, this blog has been re-branded from Ginger & Garlic cooking blog to A Brownian Walk Through Life, a blog that covers food, cooking, books, crafts but also occasional commentary on tech or my long running interest of personal finance  or investing. Recipes will still be a big part of this blog, but I am hoping to broaden it to other interests and write about them often. So, with the announcements out of the way, here is the craft I wanted to share wi…

This has been a strange year to say the least; what from spending the whole year working from home, schools from home, the global travel and life as we know coming to a pause.. unlike anything any of us would have ever imagined! I can not believe the year is coming to an end.. Through the twists and turns and the wild ride of 2020, I have still found so many things to be thankful for! I am thankful that everyone in our family and our friends are well.. sure, a bit wary with cabin fever and tired of isolation but healthy and well. Considering the hardships a lot of people are going through, that is a lot to be thankful for to be sure. So this thanksgiving, like a lot of families across US, we spent at home, just with the 3 of us. It was different, but special in it's own way. We didn't skimp on any of the dishes or the decoration.. and while the table was a lot smaller than usual, we didn't miss a single bit on the festivities and the spirit of the seaso…

2020 continues to be a very strange year. For many of us, it's been close to 8 months of working, schooling from home. While I continue to enjoy the no-commute part and spending more time w/ kids parts, a little monotone fatigue is also setting in. To add to that, we went through a crazy fire season in bay area, fueled by (guess what) a rare freak lightning storm event late summer igniting multiple fires across the nearby forests and mountains. For weeks, the sky was filled with smoke and the sun looked like a red orange ball in yellow orange skies. We lost parts of our beloved Big Basin Redwood State Park to raging fires and countless mountain communities suffered damages. Only recently that we are back to better weather now. Anyhow, through all that, here we are in the crisp fall season! Days are getting shorter and mornings are crisper. It's a blissful feeling to sit in the front yard watching the increasing yellows on the trees, fall roses in the air, b…