Eggs.

I'm so lame. Not even 24 hours after starting up my blog again, I have something I want to write about.

I want to write about eggs.

German grocery stores are different from American ones. You don't realize how alike American grocery stores are until you've been to a foreign one. Let's take eggs, for example. In an American grocery store, where do you look for the eggs? Probably in the refrigerators where you'll also find milk and orange juice. In Germany, the eggs are not refrigerated and are found either in the produce section or somewhere in the general vicinity of the baking goods.

So today, I walked into the grocery store looking for eggs, and even though I have lived in this country for four and a half years, I started walking towards the back of the store, towards the refrigerators with milk. I'm almost there when it occurs to me that, oh yeah, the eggs are in the produce section in Germany. So I turn around and go back. I searched the produce section high and low and did not find any eggs. So I decided to check by the milk anyways. And there they were. In my defense, the eggs were not with the refrigerated milk, but about four paces away and nearer to the H-milk, which is milk that doesn't need to be refrigerated, and comes in packaging more similar to a box than a carton.

Speaking of eggs, something I have learned in Germany is that eggs do not equal eggs. For moral reasons, The Boy (my German boyfriend of six and a half years) requested that I only purchase eggs from at least "Bodenhaltung" if he's going to be eating them too. Bodenhaltung means that the chickens who lay the eggs are not kept in cages, but are permitted to move freely on the ground. Even better is "Freilandhaltung", which means the chickens are allowed to move freely on the ground outdoors. I don't know if there is any sort of equivalent for this terminology in the US, because frankly, I wasn't old enough to buy eggs when I left the states. (I was 18. Everything I needed magically appeared in the refrigerator.)

However, I have discovered that the more freedom the mommy chickens have, the better their eggs taste. I know a lot of people think this is nonsense, but really, it's true. Eggs from happy chickens have a more delicious consistency when cooked and make for better baked goods. It took me a while to believe it, too. Then I accidentally bought the wrong eggs after years of eating eggs from happy chickens, and I was shocked by how unappetizing the unhappy-chicken-eggs were.

My chocolate-chip pancakes came out really good, by the way.