“No matter how much time I spend here,” Mark writes about Delhi, “it’s not enough.” Sackfuls of marigolds; tons of spices and every ingredient imaginable; seemingly unlimited customers and tourists; and a vast array of carts, bike rickshaws, hand-trucks, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, and cars, all jammed into a nearly five-hundred-year-old city that also includes mosques, temples, shrines, and residences for a couple of hundred thousand people.

Mark in Meghalaya: mountains devastated by mining; virgin forests; villages in lush valleys and verdant mountaintops; towns streaming with cars and people and shops, with an intensity that rivals that of Delhi; food everywhere. Plus, cooking lessons, a big school lunch cook-off (everything local and organic!), and learning about how farming communities feed themselves.

Mark and Kathleen spend ten days in Meghalaya, in northeast India, where they spend most of their days visiting villages both near and far, getting to know farming communities, learning about tons of new-to-the-visitors ingredients, making rice bread — and, of course, eating.