Ne kadar yağlı bir peynir

I find that when I’m down (for example, when arch-conservatives are appointed to the nations’s highest court), thinking about a nice Turkish cheese always lifts my spirits. Kate sent me this photo from her recent trip to Turkey.

Ezine is one of my favorite cheeses but it is next to impossible to find stateside. It’s a semi-hard cheese, not unlike kaseri or gruyère, but smoother and richer. And, interestingly, when you try to google “ezine cheese,” you get a bunch of e-zines about cheese! You have to google “ezine Turkish cheese,” and even then I didn’t find any local distributors. Sevan Bakery in Watertown has lots of cheeses from the Mediterranean, but I’ve never seen Ezine there. I’ve heard there’s a Turkish grocer in Methuen. I should check them out.

I can remember driving with Joe from Istanbul to Safranbolu, Turkey, with a loaf of crusty bread, a container of olives from Edremit, and a hunk of Ezine, which I had on my lap. Even though it was wrapped in paper, it left a permanent oil stain on the front of my khaki shorts. Hence the title of this post: That’s one oily hunk of cheese…

What memories.