Luxury accommodation in the Aegean countryside

Tag: breakfast

When too much breakfast is barely enough

A quick one this time.

Last time around I thought that problematic levels of food photography were still far in our future, but it turns out that the future arrives sooner than you think. With the cafe being open on Sundays now, we thought we should take a few more shots of our breakfast offerings. Mostly so we could include them on the cover of the menu or in printed flyers or something like that. So please enjoy the selection. And if any of the photos succeed in making you hungry, we are most certainly sorry-not-sorry.

Breakfast I.

Breakfast II.

Breakfast: overhead view.

Olives.

Breakfast in the shade, morning sun warming the landscape.

What can I say about the dogs that has not been said already? They continue to be loyal, selfless, deeply lazy animals. The most recent arrival is still looking for a definite name, by the way. Suggestions welcome.

Fluffy (AKA Fluffer, AKA Honey, AKA Honeybunny, AKA Lucky, AKA Lion) in  the garden. Note the  look that says “Am I allowed to be lying here? Is he going to yell at me?”

Zeliş being beautiful. “This is my pile of sand, how dare you make plaster out of it?”

In between breakfast photos we have actually done some work. Plaster is going onto the walls of rooms three and four, inside and out. Most importantly, the west wall of room three, the one facing the pool, has had its final coat of plaster so the pool area is looking much less like a construction site.

Plaster progress.

Pool pavilion tiled.

Pool area progress.

The gardens are looking great, and as usual there’s almost nothing to do except to add water sometimes.

Sunflower.

Garden gone wilder.

And we’ve had a few more guests. Thanks, people — you know who you are. Guests are doubly welcome as they provide an excuse for us to do something other than the usual construction work. So here’s one photo of further explorations at Magnesia (not sure what this building is, possibly warehouses down by the ancient harbour). Plus a gratuitous kitchen photo showing that sometimes we branch out beyond Turkish food.

Cloudy Magnesia afternoon.

Making pasta.

Ciao!

Sunshine and how to escape it

One day, not too far in the future, the feel of this blog is going to change. It will be great, one day, to make a post called “Hotel and house finally finished!”, or something similar. Then I guess we might switch the focus to food photos and landscapes and shots of undiscovered local oddities. But for now, we are still in the realm of incremental construction progress. So I hope you are all OK with another post that feels like a small step forward from the one before.

Overview of the project.

One bit of news is that the cafe is now open for business — at least it is on Sundays! And some local people have come by for long, leisurely Turkish breakfasts. We’d love to open more than just one day a week (and we do if someone books especially) but at the moment it’s hard to justify too much time away from the building work. Sadly we just can’t afford to have one or two of us sitting in the cafe all day waiting for potential customers.

Terrace looking welcoming, we hope, with a few more tables and the dog houses moved to a more suitable location at the other end of the property.

Terrace and cafe by night.

We’re still experimenting with exactly what goes into our breakfasts, but there are some staples that are always there: eggs in some form, fried vegetables, fruit, cheese, olives, lots of different jams, and of course bread.

Front to back: boiled eggs, tahini pekmez (sesame paste mixed with grape molasses), olives, butter & honey.

Front to back: apple, kiwi fruit & banana; peppers and aubergines in a tomato sauce; various jams; sigara börek (fried pastry rolls stuffed with cheese).

Spring seems to be rapidly turning into summer: today’s high will be 32 °C. And once again the warm weather has been great for the gardens. The wet winter has made it an especially good year for green things to launch themselves out of the ground.

Rose bush gone wild in the front right.

Gardens outside rooms one and two.

Garden with a view at the north end of the pool. Note the fast-growing mulberry tree just behind the trellis.

All this sunshine reminded us, though, that the pool was always going to need more shade before summer comes in earnest. The pavilion we built earlier is great, but it’s at its best in the morning. The late afternoon sun shines straight in and makes it much less hospitable. For a long time we considered going with big umbrellas (and you’ve probably seen the green umbrellas that the nice people at TwoFour Productions bought for us).  Still, the trouble with umbrellas is that a strong wind coming up the valley will often as not send them into the pool. So we sat down with Sketchup and designed a more permanent solution.

New sunshade.

One nice feature of the new sunshade is that from about 2pm in the afternoon it starts to shade one corner of the pool, making it possible for easily sunburned people (e.g., me) to get out of those UV rays.

Two layers of green shadecloth seems about right.

Middle of the day sees lots of shade around the pool now.

It’s not only the human population that have been enjoying the new and shadier pool environment. Cezmi and Sasha claimed two of the deck chairs for themselves. (Which reminds me, I need to build some nice wooden sun lounges as these chairs have seen better days.)

Cats enjoying the shade.

The cats, being cats, have been trying to claim territory all over the place. We had some guests who were far too nice and let Lucy sit on their laptop for a bit. I had a word with her afterwards though and she assures me it won’t happen again.

Cat enjoying laptop of tolerant guest. “Don’t look at gmail, look at me!”

The dogs are much more helpful and reliable, as ever. They’re not very keen on where we put their dog houses when we moved them up from the cafe terrace, so instead they have installed themselves as watchdogs in rooms three and four. They seem very happy there but I will have to break it to them eventually that rooms are for people.

Zeytin: straw dog.

And we have of course done some actual construction work. The second building has really taken shape now, with all the straw bales in. Just the fabric and mesh work to go before plastering begins.

Building two progress.

Interior progress, room four. Strips of wood define the bathroom walls, ready for old-fashioned lathe-and-plaster work.

The good weather has also given us more excuses to get out and about. Here are a couple of shots from Dilek National Park, 50 minutes south-west of us.

National park view. Greek island of Samos in the background.

Coastal drive with tree.

Finally, something we’ve never thought to include before. Opening the cafe meant we had to make sure the cafe bathrooms were finished and ready for business. You get to them by going outside, onto the veranda, and then around the corner. Thus nobody’s table is too close to the loo, which is good, but there’s a side effect of giving the bathrooms quite a nice northerly view. Here’s a photo of one of the bathrooms with an attempt to catch the view in the mirror.

Cafe bathroom.

 

Spring is coming

Winter is just about over. It’s been very wet but, thankfully for the animals of the village, not especially cold. And now there are definite signs of spring in the air — here are a couple of shots to prove it.

Misty morning landscape.

White flowers under the olive trees.

(These were taken only about a hundred metres from our new house: a short walk through the neighbour’s olives and you reach the crest of the ridge, opening up a lovely view to the east.)

We were surprised and happy to get more guests than we thought we would during the coldest part of the year. So a big thank you to all of our recent visitors. One couple was especially patient and helped us get some much-needed photos of breakfast in the cafe.

Breakfast from above.

And from the side!

A new friendlier look for the cafe: some posters and a blue-grey feature wall.

We have also managed to get some work done. The goal is still to get rooms three and four open as soon as we possibly can, hopefully in time for this summer. The roof structure is done, the waterproof membrane is on, and we’ve had some guys out to install the gutters. Tiles are being hauled up onto the roof as we speak and soon it will be time to get on with the straw-bale walls and the interior.

Roof ready for tiles.

Tile laying proceeding.

We’re really pleased with how well the pool pavilion is going to fit in with building two, as you can see in the next photo. That green mesh sunshade (on the back of the pavilion) is quite handy at the moment for making the pool area feel like less of a building site. But at some not-too-distant point in the future it will come down so we can plaster the wall behind.

Pool pavilion will end up looking like part of building two.

The new roof on building two makes it a great work space when it rains. So on days when it would have been too dangerous to go up on the slippery roof membrane, we knocked together two more picnic tables for the terrace. They just need to be painted and they’re ready for guests. The terrace is going to look a lot more hospitable having three tables instead of one.

Another picnic table getting painted.

Between guests and construction work we didn’t get a ton of time for animal photos this month, but I did manage one nice one of Lara in her new role as masked vigilante.

“Who are you?”
“I’m Batcat.”

See you next time!

Village breakfasts

Breakfast is a big deal in Turkey. There has to be fresh bread, and cheese, and tea, and multiple types of jam. Often you get more than that: vegetables (e.g., fresh cucumbers and tomatoes), eggs, sucuk (spicy beef sausage), honey, olives, olive tapenades, etc.

Breakfast is taken especially seriously in rural villages. The little country kitchens seem to be engaged in a competition to see who can do the biggest servings and have the widest variety of food.

When my mum and dad were here recently we took them to our favourite breakfast place: Köy Sofrası in the village of Kirazlı (one valley over towards the sea).  They were not disappointed…

Dad studies his camera while we wait for the food.

Dad studies his camera while we wait for the food.

The restaurant is set in the gardens where a lot of the food is grown; the chickens that lay the eggs share the undergrowth with a few cats. You lounge on a traditional sedir (Turkish low sofa) and enjoy the shade while you wait for your order. 

So much food!

So much food!

They brought us a truly ridiculous amount of food, but it all tasted fantastic. My favourite was the spicy olive tapenade (top centre in the photo above) but the soft cheese drizzled with cherry jam was also excellent.

Cucumber and tomato salad; soft cheese with cherry jam.

Cucumber and tomato salad; soft cheese with cherry jam.

The eggs and suçuk have arrived.

The eggs and sucuk have arrived.

This place is a great reference point for us: once our own rooms are open and we’re serving breakfast as part of the package, we hope to do as well as this. It will help a lot that there’s so much great produce available in our village.

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