Daily Wellness Routines
Daily journaling: a folded page kept close
My father kept a small notebook in the breast pocket of his shirt, the kind with a brown cloth cover and an...
Section
Author: Darshak Yadav
Darshak Yadav writes for Herbcare from a small flat in Ahmedabad. He grew up between his grandmother's kitchen in the old city and his father's slow evenings on the balcony, and became curious early about the household practices that never announced themselves as wellness. He reads widely across regional recipe traditions, Ayurvedic householder texts, and quiet cultural writing, and prefers writing that carries a specific place, a specific hand, a specific hour of the day. When he is not writing he is usually cooking, walking, or sitting with a cup of something warm.
105 entries in this section
Traditional Food Practices
Breakfasts across cultures: how the day begins
The first time I had breakfast in a friend's house in Beirut, I was fifteen. Her mother set out a low round...
Seasonal Living
Window light across the year: a quiet diary
The kitchen window in my apartment faces east. It is not a large window. About sixty centimetres wide and ninety tall, with...
Ayurveda Basics
Eating food warm: an old Ayurvedic idea
There is a small lunch room in Kyoto where I used to eat almost every weekday for a year. The owner, a...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
The hammam: steam, soap, and a long pause
The hammam in my old neighbourhood in Fez is below the level of the street. You go down five worn stone steps...
Seasonal Living
Summer cooling habits: keeping the house quietly low in temperature
By eight in the morning the streets of Sfax are already shimmering. The shutters in our building, painted that pale blue you...
Herbal Drinks
Lemongrass tisane: from Southeast Asian kitchens
In a kitchen in Hoi An, in central Vietnam, the lemongrass grew in a long ceramic trough on the back porch. The...
Traditional Food Practices
Family meal rituals: one table, every evening
In my parents' apartment in Bologna, the kitchen has a small round table that seats four comfortably and six with some shuffling...
Daily Wellness Routines
The traditional sleep rhythm: two halves of the night
There is a passage in an old English diary, written before the railways changed everything, where a farmer describes waking around midnight,...
Ayurveda Basics
A small Ayurvedic spice shelf
The spice shelf in my mother's kitchen in Bangalore is not the romantic kind. There are no hand-labelled glass jars or chalkboard...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Foot soaks: warm water, salt, ten minutes
My mother in Treviso kept a deep enamel basin under the kitchen sink, and on cold evenings, when she came in from...
Traditional Food Practices
Making curd at home: warm milk, a clean cloth
In Bangalore, my mother sets a small earthenware pot on the kitchen counter every evening before bed. Warm milk goes in, a...