palace of winds

Last night I had a long, vivid dream about solving a ghost mystery with the crew from SVU (including, to my upon-waking delight, Stabler). It was an intricate little plot about some frat boys plotting murders, and the ghost of one of the boys they’d killed helping lead us to the answers. In the end we were standing in a dim room ringed with lamps and watched while they were one by one clicked off as the ghost swept toward the door. There was a rush of wind as he swirled around and then past me and was gone.

It was a little strange waking from a murder-mystery ghost dream with the feeling that it had been a good one, a happy one, but it was.

I am still sore everywhere from Sunday’s exercising but it’s easing a little. Well, and probably simultaneously sustained a little by yesterday’s exercising, but it felt good, and I did an extra 15-minute stretching video afterwards in an effort to help keep everything loose and happy. Or as happy as it’s going to get right now. Today’s goal is lots of water and another long but light-weight, careful work-out. I’m keeping a record of calories burned to help motivate me through the month. I don’t have a particular goal in mind, apart from ‘many’.

No picture from last night’s dinner. By the time I’d finished working out and exercising and washing a whole heap of dishes so I could make dinner, it was rather late and it looked delicious and so I ate it. It was anda nu popli from Savoring India, which is a really big, beautiful book — I tend to do best with cookbooks that either have lots of pictures or short ingredients lists. I’m still building my cooking vocabulary so I tend to get lost on long lists and my mind wanders instead of trying to figure out the gist of the taste and texture of the dish.

Anyhow, anda nu popli is an egg salad sandwich made from sauted onions and diced hard boiled eggs mixed with spices and slim-diced chile and a bit of tomato, served open-faced on toast. It was quite good, and I’m having it again this afternoon along with a big spinach salad with carrots and onions and raisins and more of the orange vinaigrette from this weekend.

I’ve been dabbling in a lot of vegetarian and vegan websites and message board posts in the past week or so, and every day I think I’m settling more into the idea of doing it long-term. I’m thinking of getting some books out of the library, but the trouble there of course is the immediate bias. I don’t want to be sold one way or the other — I just want some help working through how I feel about it, not how the author feels. This is really the wrong place to ask for recommendations, I think, but if anyone’s got some please share.

I don’t think I’ve linked to this before, but apologies if I have: My new favorite website is Vegan Lunchbox. I just discovered it last week, though it looks like I’m late on the bandwagon as it’s just won some big foodblog award. Anyhow, it’s this really fantastic blog that makes me wish I were that seven-year-old boy, because his mom packs the most amazing lunches, and makes it look like the most fun in the world.