Cafe Fernando

Selimiye

It has been a little over two weeks since I got back from my vacation and I’m still trying to adapt to city life. You see, it was my first vacation in three years. Funny how I’ve gotten used to the construction happening next door for over two years now…

I’ve spent the first three days of my vacation in a small fishing village called Selimiye, located on the mountainous Bozburun Peninsula, where the Mediterranean sea meets the Aegean sea. It is not as uninhabited as I imagined it would be, but certainly more peaceful and uncrowded than Bodrum, which I stayed for a week afterward.

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Baked Pasta with Tomatoes, Mozzarella and Aged Gouda

Here’s a post I’ve been sitting on for a year now. Yes, a year. I know, it’s crazy. But by the time I decided to write about it last year, tomato season had already ended. And I just didn’t want to torture you with this wonderful recipe in the middle of the winter when juicy, sweet and bright-red tomatoes are nowhere to be found.

I was planning to share photos from my recent trip to Selimiye, a small village on the Mediterranean coast in southwest Turkey, but those can wait.

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Basil Pesto Recipe

It’s that time of year again. Time to turn the season’s juiciest and sweetest tomatoes into a homemade tomato sauce and preserving it for the winter months. It is also time to stock up your freezer with basil pesto sauce. I’ve managed to freeze ten cups so far. That is in addition to the batches I’ve gone through by tossing it with pasta, grilled vegetables, spreading it in sandwiches and even on a Margherita pizza I ordered yesterday.

Pesto means “pounded” in Italian as traditionally it is prepared by grinding the ingredients in a marble mortar &  pestle. I might have baked swan-shaped eclairs once, but pounding twenty cups of pesto by hand is beyond my patience, especially during a sticky summer day.

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