A rustic meal
One windy Saturday afternoon, I walked into the Horizon Plaza in Gurugram, Haryana, to find the outdoor Saturday artisanal market in full swing. Stalls were dedicated to single-origin coffees, organic mushrooms, winter goodies such as gond laddoos and jaggery rewaris, in addition to stalls with food. The Laksh Farms stall, with its delicious aromas, stood out. Located off the Gurugram-Faridabad highway, this farm is a regular at the market curated by Puneeta Chadha Khanna. At the Horizon Plaza, Laksh Farms hosts Rajjo ka Chulha, in which ladies from the farm cook rustic meals with winter greens and millets. Smiling shawl-draped women made parathas on a mud chulha embellished with sequins. Head over for a satisfying meal and a piping hot kulhad ki chai, and return home with fresh winter produce from the farm. — Avantika Bhuyan
Cold, smooth and pista
Pista is nobody’s favourite flavour of ice cream or gelato. It is revoltingly green and seems to have no flavour at all. I was just being polite to Shantala Thimmaiah, owner of the excellent restaurant BA+SH in Chennai, when I agreed to taste their Roasted Sicilian Pistachio Gelato. Apart from serving a superb, well-curated pork-centric menu, Thimmaiah retails her Bingeasana range of handcrafted nut butters and gelato here. A pleasant surprise: The pista gelato wasn’t green but a warm shade of caféau lait. “Swirl it in your mouth, then swallow,” she instructed, as if it were wine. I did and was rewarded with a play of textures and flavours—nutty, cold, smooth and absolutely delicious. Pair it with the Bingeasana Coorg filter coffee gelato — the bite of the coffee offsets the smooth nuttiness of the pistachio. — Shalini Umachandran
Filling in colours
Many past disappointments have taught me not to keep big new year resolutions. This year, I have one small one: to start painting, no matter how terrible I might be at it. Two weeks into the year, a cousin, an artist, made a reel about painting a beautiful landscape using a calendar as the canvas. I took it as a sign and ordered the unique, do-it-yourself calendars by Bohemian Alley, a wonderful idea for those who love to customise everything. The monthly pages are divided into two parts: dates on the right and a blank box on the left. You can doodle, paint or write poems. A blank box staring at you every month, urging you to do something creative with it, to at least try, might be what someone like me needs to keep the resolutions. — Aisiri Amin
Meet the girls
I didn’t expect to really like Ginny And Georgia (Netflix), imagining it to be a slightly more woke, less white-feminism infused version of Gilmore Girls. But it kept showing up in my recommended list so I decided to give it a go, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sure, the series, which focuses on a particularly dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, contains too many American high-school cliches. But it is clever, darkly funny and has one of the most interesting, complex characters I have seen in a while: Georgia Miller. The second season of the show, which came out earlier this month, wasn’t just pacy and fun; it also succeeded in offering a sensitive, nuanced account of mental health struggles. —Preeti Zachariah
