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