Water for Elephants: Polish Skillet Breakfast Recipe 🥁🥁🥁1/2

This film about a Depression era traveling circus has it all – glamorous illusion and gritty reality, glittering gowns and desperate men, stateroom Champagne and boxcar hooch. We glimpse at the exotic creatures under the big tent, animals and humans alike, yet we also see the squalid and brutish life they lead in between shows.

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The White Countess: White Russian Cocktail Recipe 🥁🥁🥁🥁

Think of everything that guarantees box office gold – squealing car chases, steamy passion, rampant explosions, tortuous plot twists, hormone addled teens or octogenarians, and a peppering of coarse humor thrown in for good measure. Well, you’ll get none of it with this final Merchant Ivory collaboration set in 1936 Shanghai, but the simple story will stay with you long after the latest blockbuster fades from memory.

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Letters to Juliet: Tuscan Bruschetta Recipe 🥁🥁🥁🥁

In 2010 I found an undiscovered gem. The plot is a gentle drive down rambling country roads, not the roller coaster ride with stomach dropping thrills or tortuous twists we’ve come to expect too often. Its destination is not unexpected, but just as sweet nonetheless, and it recalls something from another era, a sense of grace.

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Lost in Space: Oreo Icebox Cake 🥁 🥁 🥁 1/2

Lost in Space: Oreo Icebox Cake  🥁 🥁 🥁 1/2

Sure, it’s cheesy, a cinematic stew of Han Solo, Indiana Jones, look alike monsters from Jurassic World, bits of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, sprinkles of Doogie Howser, M.D., and even MacGyver. But it also affirms Faith, Family, Forgiveness and Redemption without ever explicitly mentioning religion per se.  This is Netflix, after all. 

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The Guns of Navarone: Greek Moussaka Recipe 🥁🥁🥁🥁1/2

The Guns of Navarone: Greek Moussaka Recipe 🥁🥁🥁🥁1/2

This critical and box office success has as much action as the Bond or the Furious franchises, and it was all done 6 decades ago.  Along the way, in between evading trigger-happy Nazis, a hull-crushing storm at sea, and a dizzying climb up a sheer black wall made extra dangerous by the storm, the characters have time for some pretty insightful ruminations on the ethics of war.

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Red River: Cowboy Coffee and Chuck Wagon Recipes: 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

Red River: Cowboy Coffee and Chuck Wagon Recipes: 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

In his first Western Director Howard Hawks captures the Wild West in a profound way. It’s not shootouts at the OK corral, but a desperate Texas cattle baron who will do whatever it takes to survive. If that means branding over a neighbor’s cows, shooting gunslingers who dispute his right to the land, or even horsewhipping his own cowboys and threatening to hang deserters, then so be it.

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