Every cloud has a silver lining

Last Christmas I got my husband a subscription to Netflix.  He has never ordered a movie and very rarely watches the movies I pick; however I have enjoyed it and it has saved me some money.  I use it to check out movies before I purchase them and that has been real handy as some movies only last about 15 min before I eject them.  We very seldom go to the movies due to the cost; maybe once a year for something special (Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR and an occasional other).  I would much rather spend my entertainment money on books and music and movies I will watch over and over again.  I also use Netflix to play movies on my computer when I am working on a project (sewing, inside gardening, or other such things).  I feel bad when my presents are not useful or enjoyed by those that they are intended for, but I have enjoyed this one, and the kids have too.  It gets used and enjoyed even more when kids and grandkids visit.  So silver lining.
I think the best of the silver lining is I get to try movies that I might otherwise never have watched.  I can even watch a chick flick while Tom is at work without worrying about being teased about the sniffles.  I can lean back and enjoy.  Maybe even enjoy some chocolate, be the typically decadent housewife. LOL.  Anyway with the change of season crud, you know the stomach bug going around or the sinus problems or the cold that seems to show up when the first weather changes, going around the house and sending me to the doctors, I actually watched a movie all the way through without ever pausing or falling asleep or being distracted and having to rewind.  For me this is something of a miracle.  There are still movies that I have 'watched' many times and we've had for years that I am surprised to find scenes that I had never seen before.  The nice thing, the best thing about the movie is I really liked it and hopefully someone this Christmas will give it to me.  Below is the Trailer:



                       It's about the many different aspects of love and forgiveness in many different relationships.  The Last Song was very enjoyable, not a movie I would have bought without seeing first.  It just happened to be here when I was sick enough to actually watch it, but not so sick that I fell asleep watching.  I also usually don't watch a movie if I have read the book first.  My philosophy about that is the movie can never live up to the book or at least there are few exceptions to this.  I think I now need to read the book.
Hope all is well at you house and you can find some time to find an unexpected pleasure, a silver lining if need be in you life.
Johnina  :^A

Brownies for breakfast

Actually these brownies were made for dinner not for breakfast and having brownies for a meal brings back two very different memories and two very different trains of thought.  One of the memories which inspired the Halloween decorations comes from one of my all time favorite movies 'Practical MagicSearch Amazon.com for Practical Magic' with Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Stockard Channing and Diane Wiest.  You see they never quite fit into the town they live in; a town their family has lived in for generations; because you see they are a line of witches and live their lives their own way.  Anyway when Sally and Jillian's parents  die and they move in with their aunties, they are taken into the house and promised chocolate cake for breakfast.  When Sally's husband dies, she moves back in with the aunties and in order to try to be normal tells her girls and the aunties there will be no chocolate for breakfast.  Later when Sally goes to rescue her sister Jillian from an abusive boyfriend and brings her back home; the aunties invite her to have brownies for breakfast; which they had been doing all along.  I always thought that the aunties were pretty smart cookies, sometimes it takes a treat to comfort and to get over the rough spots of life.

There are several themes that run though this movie and even though I do not believe in witchcraft the movie is pretty wise, sometimes funny and sometimes touching.  And in the end the neighborhood women band together to save Jullian from her nasty old boyfriend, showing that in the end we are all more alike than we are different.  I've been watching as I've been writing this blog and it's been delightful.  Even if I had the brownies for desert last night instead of dinner it did serve to cheer me up.

The other memory associated with Brownies for dinner happened when we had 5 kids still at home and I was trying very hard to improve the way we were eating.  I had given up on the diet of the week threw the scale out and decided just to eat healthy, exercise and not worry about the weight.  Amazingly I lost the baby fat from 5 pregnancies and kept it off for many years.  When I tried a new recipe, at first I would make sure there was enough of the rest of the dinner so if someone did not like the new item they didn't go to bed hungry.  We found some good new recipes and some real disasters, some I had a hard time gagging down.  About this time I got a computer program cookbook software that gave nutrition info on the recipes so I could adjust my recipies and make them healthier and be able to get a nice mix between taste and health.  While I was doing that I made an AMAZING discovery. my stroganoff, my corn chowder and my brownies all had the same nutrition, same calories, same fat, same vitamins, same protien, same carbs.  And they were all dinner size portions no tiny brownie- this was a 1/4 of an 8 x8 pan.  So when nobody liked the dinner we throw it out and one of the three big kids would make brownies for dinner.  It made trying out new recipes fun we either had a hit or we had brownies.  

Since I knew it had the same nutrition as my stroganoff and we only did it maybe once a week.  I got to the point where I no longer felt guilty about the brownies for dinner.

Brownie Recipe

3/4 cup cocoa

2 cup sugar

1 cup margarine

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Stir together sugar and cocoa.  Add margarine and stir well.  Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well between each egg.  Stir in remaining ingredients mixing well.  Spread into greased 9x12 pan.  Bake in 350*preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes.

View from my kitchen window