palace of winds

Last night I dreamt I won Survivor by having the largest hips. We had a contest where we all put our hands on either side of our hips — the heels of our palms against our skin, our fingers stretched forward to demonstrate the width — and stepped face-to-face with one another to compare handspan. I don’t remember anything about a million dollars, but in winning I got the last badges I needed for my Gold Award in Girl Scouts, which in my dream felt like a much bigger deal than it is in real life.

Since my last food-ramble I’ve made two more dishes from Real Vegetarian Thai, which have cemented my complete adoration of the book. My paht thai (or pad thai as it’s more commonly known here in the midwest at least) was somewhat less than traditional, I imagine, as I used less than half the oil called for, but all the same it was delicious. The secret, I think, was in the tamarind paste, which is all lovely and sweet-sour.

But mostly I wanted to confess my Friday night dinner, to prove that I do not always cook nice meals. It consisted of: a strawberry banana smoothie from Caribou, a few samples from Whole Foods (cheese & bread), an entire red bell pepper (they were on sale), and a cup of hot chocolate, the latter two consumed while lounging in the bath with a book.

Speaking of the book — it was Appetites: Why Women Want, which I finally finished. I was a little disappointed in the last few chapters, as she rounded up what I felt was quite a good look at this whole complex emotional and cultural tangle by blaming it all on mothers. Well. That’s a big of an exaggeration, but she kind of points the finger at bad childhoods, and whatever my miseries in gradeschool — and I am convinced no one is without them — I cannot at all say I had a bad childhood, and I can especially not say I had parents who didn’t love me. I have parents who loved and love me very much, and happily I have never been left in doubt of that. So I felt like she got a bit simplistic in the end, which was disappointing, but it’s a small enough part of the book that I still quite recommend it.

For me, St. Patrick’s has become this strange sort of closet-airing holiday. A holiday of brutal honesty and self-reflection. And a day where I always take at least a moment to remember all the wonderful people in my life, and let myself be overwhelmed and deeply grateful that if I fall I will surely be caught. It’s a day for acknowledging that life is so hard and so beautiful.

Back when I was cutting I wrestled a lot with whether or not I should talk to someone about it. It was alternately far too shameful and deviant (I was supposed to be sane, confident, in control; I was supposed to be normal) and far too cliched, trendy, so common that I was silly to be fussing over it that way, feeling like it might be a big deal. So it was by turns too enormous and too insignificant to confess. As I began wanting to stop, the urge to tell someone increased, and the closest I came happened to be St. Paddy’s. In the end I chickened out, but made a promise that by the next St. Patrick’s I would make some peace with this great terrible secret or I would tell someone. And that’s the year I stopped. It wasn’t completely that promise — I was just finally ready, I think — but having that fixed date in mind, that goal, helped. And knowing that there was someone out there who would be the keeper of my secret, someone who at least knew I had one if not what it was, was a great comfort to me during that time.

So to all y’all, Irish or not, kisses from me today.

It started snowing again last night, and I walked to my garage this morning in a dreamy whirl of big fluffy white flakes. What I like to think of as snowglobe snow. And I’m so ready for winter to be over, to not be worrying a little about getting my car stuck again, to not come into work white-fingered with snow in my shoes, but I can’t not be happy in the face of snowglobe snow. Everything feels big and clear and beautiful.

But it all got smaller and wetter as I drove west, and the big happy has quietly been draining away. Now I’m just feeling a little melancholy and strangely fragile. It’s a feeling I’m not supposed to be having this week; I think it may be a symptom of my body fighting off some little bug in the quiet, unacknowledged way it has. We work well together that way — I refuse to acknowledge the beginning niggling signs of coming down with something, and my body viciously squishes it out of existence, and then I do not come down with anything. So right now I am just brewing some peppermint tea because it is winter and I feel like it, and not to help the bit of ache in my throat. Which may, after all, be from the strange untimely crying urge anyway.

Speaking of moods like clockwork, I’m thinking of going off the birth control. It’s damned convenient, but I’m just not sure it’s worth it. I think I’ve only stayed on it this long because there’s a small, stupid part of me still a little afraid about what happened last spring. And because I’m stubborn and mood-denying.

I’ve picked Appetites back up recently, which is probably also part of the mood. It’s such a good book but it’s sort of barged straight into the conflux of all my issues and is doing all sorts of light-flicking and pot-stirring and other-metaphoring. I keep trying to have honest self-confrontations but my self keeps changing, which makes it sort of impossible.

I’ve also been poking back through the archives of dooce, a blog I read bits of in weird irregular fits, usually once a year or so. And there was one entry where she was talking about scratching her daughter’s back, and remembering her mother scratching her back, and her secret fear as a child that her mother would one day tire of it, and her secret fear now that her daughter will one day tire of having it done to her, and I think mostly right now I’m just missing having someone to scratch my back.

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.

Last night dinner was from Suvir Saran’s Indian Home Cooking. I made the stuffed peppers and khitcheree, which is a thick stew of lentils and rice that Saran calls the Indian equivalent to chicken soup.

The peppers were, in a word, amazing. Or pepper, as I had just the one and so altered the recipe accordingly. It’s stuffed with potatoes mashed with various spices, and the result was knee-weakeningly delicious. Because India’s food tradition is rooted in a belief in the medicinal powers of everything we eat and the importance of range and balance of flavor, there’s a focus on multiple flavors that American cuisine often lacks — and, more importantly, inclusion of sour. Important because I love sour.

This particular dish calls for fresh lime (or lemon, but I used lime) juice mashed into the potatoes. My first bite went something like: Ooo, savory, mmsweetOMGsouryay! Normally I’m a cheapskate and buy only green peppers because they’re so much less expensive than red et al, but red were on sale last week and I must admit this dish wouldn’t've been at all the same (or as good, I think) without that sweetness. Anyway, it whipped together pretty quickly, and it’s definitely a show-stopper.

Consisting primarily of yellow lentils, basmati rice, and onions, and me having white bowls, the khitcheree was aggressively unphotogenic. It tastes pretty good, though, and I love thick porridge-consistency stews. There is a spice in it, though, that I will unfortunately have to root out and make sure not to use any more. Several of the dishes Bryce and I made last month had the same note, and I can say now that I’ve given it a fair shake and I just don’t care for it. I suspect it’s the black peppercorn, because I’ve always disliked black pepper, and was giving it a go for the sake of authenticity and because I know there are lots of different sorts of pepper and admittedly I’ve only ever had the bottom-grade pre-ground stuff you find in the cheap pepper shakers at Walmart. There are enough unfamiliar spices in the offending dishes, though, that I think I may break down and do the potato experiment soon. (That is, cooking up small quantities of potatoes with different spices singly or in small groups, to see how you feel about the tastes and how the tastes combine, since potato is a good bland (and inexpensive) backdrop.)

It’s all a shame because it was a big pot of stew and I really don’t want to waste it all for one off note, but I’m not sure how many more days I can get it down before my tastebuds revolt and rise up to seize control of my brain and I wake five minutes later from my pepper-induced mania to discover khitcheree splattered all over the office and myself gnawing on the coat tree for sustenance.