Since being home, I've been really enjoying the art of cooking again. I haven't made anything very gourmet or fancy, but just having skillets that don't scorch everything and a variety of foods, spices, meat and cooking implements makes me want to cook.

Although I planned to get right to work making the crumpets we love so much, I haven't gotten around to that yet. I bought some yeast, but it is just sitting there looking at me, not actually making the crumpets for me.

Over in England, the kids loved the Scottish grown carrots. They ate them for snacks and gobbled them down. Back home again, they don't particularly like them and when raw carrots are on the menu, they insist they are not consumable without ranch for dipping. I can't tell a huge difference, but my children seem to.

One interesting thing we came home with was a love of brown eggs. I'd been told before that brown eggs tasted better than white ones, but I never really bothered to research that information before. While we were in England, we usually bought a fifteen egg carton (silly metric system) of mixed size brown eggs, which was the cheapest thing in the store. Since the only skillet we had scorched everything, I usually hardboiled the eggs and the kids loved them. One night for dinner they ate almost all fifteen.

When we came home, I bought our usual white eggs and a few days later made hardboiled eggs for breakfast. "These smell odd," said the five year old. The shells were really, really thin and the flavor wasn't what I'd remembered. Nobody wanted to finish their eggs.

Just for experimental purposes I bought a box of brown eggs (not fancy cage free, organic, farm raised ones). We tried them hardboiled and made a pan of scrambled white and scrambled brown. And in blind tastes tests we could all tell the difference. The brown ones had a harder shell and were much more flavorful. Our current compromise is now to buy brown eggs for eating and white ones for baking. I don't think I'm ready to move to the country and raise my own chickens yet, so that will have to do.

For me one of the joys of traveling is finding new foods, not necessarily exotic things, but different things -- like black currant popsicles (oops, ice lollies) or local varieties of cheese. England made for a pleasant diversion from normal eating with some new and different things to try. I just never thought I'd change my egg purchasing habits because of a trip abroad.