Cheese!

Mondays are the one day a week that my roommate Orçun has off work. So I usually hang out with him in the afternoon. Often we end up paying bills and then going to this great cafe near to our flat. Today I was completely absorbed in my book (The Reader, I would highly recommend it) when he took these photos.





Cheese...Although I love Turkish food as everyone I have ever talked to about it knows, I have found myself in the last two weeks making two cross continent treks to find imported cheese. The first was when I went to the annual american women of Istanbul's christmas baazar. I actually went for the promise of ethnic food in general, but I had to teach so I got there three hours in. By then most of the food had gone. The food court upstairs was closing. The candy canes were gone. But I did find a half a kilo of cheddar cheese made in Sweden. The cheese along with bread from my slightly used toaster fed me for most of the week.

Last Friday, I went with Kathy (her son goes to my school and she found me my job), Leah (house sitter who let me sleep in the place she was house sitting), and two other older expat women to the Italian consulate to look for cheese and pork products. I ended up getting some Romano and some Asiago cheese, which are once again fantastic. The only thing I am missing now is the carolina moon cheese the chapel hill creamery makes, and cheese cheese. The tuesday market here is far far bigger than the carrboro farmers market could ever aspire to be, but for all that the carrboro farmers market has a wider variety of cheese.

That being said, I have now managed to find sage, rosemary, canned mexican beans. The people in the grocery stores near my house must think I'm pretty strange. And when I asked for the leaves and stalks of the celery but not the root (what they eat here) they must have thought I was even stranger. Not to mention a bit inept because I can never open the plastic bags they give me.

The time I failed with spices was for nutmeg. A while ago Ingo was making some califlower soup and wanted nutmeg and flour. The flour was easy. My dictionary told me that the word from nutmeg was kuçuk hindistancevizi, or little coconut, or little indian walnut. So at my local grocery store I was looking at the spices and asked for a kuçuk hindistancevizi, and he handed me a small packet of grated coconut. When I told him no, that wasn't what I wanted, he got offended and told me that was the smallest package of coconut they had.

My food discussion comes to an end. Almost. The one adorable second grade class held a bake sale today and the other will tomorrow. It reminded me of being in elementary school in north carolina again.