Bendiversary 2026: Cassoulet Encore

Once again, seemingly more quickly this year, February is upon us in a flash. We have crammed our February celebrations (Valentine's Day, my birthday, and the anniversary of our moving to Bend) into a single celebration that we call our Bendiversary. It is now tradition that I make a cassoulet for us and our friends. We invited Rob and Dyce and Michelle and Andreas; sadly, Rob and Dyce were feeling poorly and had to back out.

Celebrating with Michelle and Andreas

While I am in the kitchen cooking, Ann handles the table in the dining room and always does such a nice job. 

For our meal, cassoulet is a given, leaving only an appetizer to devise, along with the de rigueur salad, the necessary light and acidic counterpoint to the heavy and decadent cassoulet. For once, I thought not about what guests would like, but what I would like for an appetizer to celebrate my birthday.

If I had some foie gras, I would have made torchons. If I had rabbit liver, I would have made a terrine. Sadly, while those items were always available to me in the restaurant trade, I cannot get them here. Never fear, I started my charcuterie career with chicken livers and they would suffice beautifully for this meal.

I chose to make a mousse, a dead simple affair involving cooking minced shallots and fresh thyme in butter, then adding chicken livers and cooking until just barely done. Lacking cognac (it's a pain in the rear to visit the liquor store), I drizzled in a bit of high rye bourbon and let that cook off. The livers went into the food processor with a bit of white pepper and freshly grated nutmeg. After spinning them up, I added just enough heavy cream to smooth out the paste. I transferred the mousse to a bowl while still warm, letting it set up in the cooler overnight.

Croustades, Mousse de Foie de Volaille, Cornichons

Brut Sparkling Nerello Mascalese
Excellent with Liver Mousse

When I made cassoulet at the restaurant, several times a month in the winter, I had access to all the classic ingredients: large white Tarbais beans, house-made duck confit, meaty and garlicky saucisse de Toulouse, and plenty of poitrine de porc (pork belly). After we butchered one of our hogs, cassoulet was sure to be on the menu. Now in retirement, I do not have access to hogs, ducks to confit, and many other things. Happily, I can get outstanding American-grown cassoulet beans from neighboring California. Everything else, I have to wing, substituting things that I do have.

Traditionally, cooks make cassoulet in an earthenware pot called a cassole, from which the dish has taken its name. At the restaurant, we made it in a huge rondeau, a flat round braising pan that would take an entire shelf in our commercial oven. At home, I have a decent-sized enameled cast iron cocotte that serves six. I also have a smaller rondeau that serves eight. When I have made cassoulet in the past, I have made batches from a kilogram of beans, enough to serve a dozen or more. Heretofore, I split the cassoulet between the cocotte and the rondeau with excellent results, if slightly different cook times.

In the last year or so, I purchased a deep roaster that could easily hold the entire batch, simplifying my life. Never having used this pan for cassoulet before left the cooking and cook time a bit of a crapshoot, but it worked wonderfully.

I cannot believe how many people put bread crumbs on cassoulet. Scream with me: FAUX PAS! One of the glories of a cassoulet is its crust. This crust develops over time. Once it forms, I punch it back into the liquid and let it reform, again and again, up to seven times. This is cassoulet. The following series of photos shows the progression.

Cassoulet Assembled, Ready for Oven

Cassoulet, After 4th Punchdown

Cassoulet Ready to Serve, After 7th Punchdown

Cassoulet is a load in the stomach, meaning that it really needs no side dishes. I always serve it with a salad with a really classic acidic mustardy shallot vinaigrette. The acid helps refresh the palate from the rich flavors of the long-cooked beans and meats. This dressing I made with mustard, tarragon vinegar, extra virgin olive oil, and minced shallots. I make the tarragon vinegar by stuffing a bottle of rice vinegar with fresh tarragon and leaving it in the dark pantry for weeks to flavor. The salad changes with my mood and what is available. This is is baby spinach, julienne of apple, julienne of fennel, and toasted slivered almonds.

Spinach, Apple, Fennel, Almonds, Shallot-Tarragon Vinaigrette

So Good!

I am already looking forward to my next cassoulet, which I am going to make in less than a week for a wine event we are having at the house.

Valentine's 2026: Corzetti

This year for Valentine's Day, a day when we are excited to stay home away from the hordes of diners in restaurants, fresh pasta was calling to us.

When I was a young man, in my early 20s in the early 1980s, fresh egg pasta was all the rage in America. You could not claim to be a cook if you did not make fresh pasta. In those formative years, I made scads of pasta, tagliatelle and pappardelle mainly, primarily unflavored but at times with tomato paste, spinach, squid ink, saffron, and you name it.

Happy Valentine's Day to Us!

As awareness of real Italian food grew, the food cognoscenti, today called foodies, came to understand Italian cuisine as something other than practiced at red sauce joints of the type that Tony Shaloub lamented in "The Big Night." Or to quote Tucci in response to a request for spaghetti and meatballs on the same plate, "sometimes the spaghetti likes to be alone." We came to learn about antipasti, primi, and secondi and so many other things.

Demand and awareness drew more imports of good quality Italian box pasta about the same time as I was commuting three hours a day to and from DC and had two babies to feed when I got home. Dried pasta was a godsend for a quick and largely stress-free meal. I switched from fresh to dried for the longest time, decades really, loving the bronze die pastas from Gragnano.

Now that I am in my 60s, the pendulum has swung back to fresh pasta, no doubt influenced by travel to Italy and the availability in retirement of time to devote to making pasta. Early in my life, fresh pasta was synonymous with northern egg pasta. Now, I am concentrating on southern pastas of semolina remacinata and water, with no eggs. I have a goal to make my fingers speak orecchiette fluently.

For our Valentine's Day pasta, Ann chose corzetti, a classic and ancient disk-shaped pasta from Liguria (also home to trofie). Making corzetti is a two-step process. First, you cut rounds from a sheet of pasta. Then, using a wooden stamp, you press a design into both sides of the pasta. The designs vary, but were often carved representations of the family crest. Our corzetti mold is rather simpler, a cheap mold with a star on one side and a spiral on the other.

Corzetti are not a shape that I have ever seen on a restaurant menu, though I suppose they might be found in restaurants in Liguria, a province that I have not visited. The only way for us to experience them is to make our own, which we set out to do after opening a bottle of nice Champagne with which to toast ourselves.

Here's to Us!

Les Frères Mignon L'Aventure Premier Cru
Crisp Extra Brut Blanc des Blancs Champagne

The Champagne opened, Ann set about scaling out the flour for the corzetti dough while I whipped up a quick batch of artichoke pesto to serve on bruschette for an antipasto. Ordinarily, I do not serve artichokes or artichoke heavy dishes with wine; artichokes can wreck many wines. A safe bet is always a really crisp unoaked white and the Champagne held its own.

Scaling Flour for the Dough

Assembling Bruschette

Artichoke Pesto Bruschette

Artichoke pesto is a no-brainer, dead simple antipasto that takes seconds to make in a food processor when made with canned artichoke hearts. It is best made and eaten right away, though it will store for a few days in the cooler. If I were using fresh or frozen artichoke hearts, I would add lemon juice to keep the pesto from turning brown. Canned artichokes always contain citric acid, so adding an additional anti-oxidant is not necessary. I do not add much olive oil or cheese; I want this to be fresh and less caloric.

1 can (400g) artichoke hearts, drained

leaves from 3-4 sprigs fresh basil

1 ounce (30g) raw pine nuts

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

pinch of Kosher salt

grated pecorino, enough to sit in palm of hand

drizzle of extra virgin olive oil

Put all the ingredients except the olive oil in the food processor and blend to a smooth paste. Drizzle in olive oil until the pesto takes on the consistency you want. I wanted this batch to be a drier paste rather than a smoother sauce. Season to taste.

Ann continued on with putting together the dough as I was assembling the bruschette. Corzetti dough can contain eggs or not, depending on how your great grandmother made it. We followed a recipe from a Ligurian woman who uses 00 flour, eggs, and white wine. I took over kneading the dough for its final ten minutes, after which, I put it to rest on the counter under a towel. While waiting for the dough to rest, we sat at the counter and enjoyed our wine and bruschette.

After appetizers, I rolled the pasta into a fairly thick sfoglia and we tag-teamed cutting and stamping the corzetti.

Cut Rounds for Corzetti

Stamped Corzetti

Corzetti Stamp

Admittedly, we have a cheap corzetti stamp with a star or flower on one side and a spiral on the other. Some of the hand-carved pearwood Italian stamps are incredibly beautiful and are much more intricate than ours. That said, the really pedestrian looking spiral is quite amazing at trapping and holding onto the sauce.

A traditional sauce is olive oil, marjoram (maggiorana), garlic, and pine nuts. Some use walnuts instead. For our part, neither of us are big fans of marjoram, but we love sage (salvia). In fact, the very first meal Ann ever cooked for me so very long ago was a pasta in sage browned butter.

Our sauce I made quickly by heating olive oil and adding chopped fresh sage until it crisped. Then I added a handful of pine nuts and two large cloves of minced garlic. Both those additions browned in seconds after which I transferred the sauce to a cold steel bowl to keep it from cooking further. Moments later, I added the cooked pasta and tossed it.

Cooking Sage in Olive Oil

Sauce Ready: Sage, Pine Nuts, and Garlic in Olive Oil

Corzetti, like many pastas, come with a built-in timer. As they cook, they float, just like gnocchi. These floated in about two minutes, but wanted just another scant minute longer in the boiling water for a grand total of three minutes of cook time.

Cooked Corzetti Floating

Corzetti with Sage, Pine Nuts, and Garlic

Making corzetti with Ann was a lot of fun. Her take is that they are too labor intensive, but as an ex-restaurant chef, I do not mind putting in the work.

DRT: GoodDog! to Big Eddy

I have now walked all of the publicly accessible trail along the Deschutes between Sunriver and Bend. Yesterday, I walked the final little section between the private property where LOGE sits (sat; it is closed now) and Meadow Day Use Area.  I have avoided this section in the past because it is among the more crowded sections of the trail, especially because it runs through the GoodDog! off-leash area. A bonus is that all those people come with happy dogs and I got to meet a lot of awesome dogs. Usually, I park in the middle at Dillon Falls and go upstream to Benham, downstream to Meadow, or some combination of upstream and downstream.

I parked at Rimrock Trailhead and walked into the sun up and over the rim rock, then down to the river, then south along the river to Big Eddy where I turned around, a total of a bit more than 10 miles. The following photos are more or less in the order I shot them.

Ample Frost as I Scaled the Rim Rock

Winter 2026, Where is the Snow?

Fencing Around Restoration Area

Pebble Garden

Unmistakable Lodgepole Pine Cones
They Remain on the Tree Until They Disintegrate

Mature Lodgepole Bark
When Younger, the Bark is Scaly

Columnar Jointing in the Basalt

More Columns

Greenleaf Manzanita Blooming Early This Year

River Opposite Deschutes River Woods is Flat

Male Mallards are Getting Frisky

River Scum in an Eddy

Creeping Oregon Grape
Low Growing, Matte Burgundy Leaves

Holly-Leaved Oregon Grape
Tall Growing, Shiny Deep Wine-Colored Leaves

Pygmy Nuthatches Everywhere
All Three Nuthatches in Evidence Yesterday
Pygmy, Red-Breasted, and White-Breasted

Cattail Along Slough Behind Seventh Mountain

Prince of Pine, Lava Island

Main Stem of Deschutes from Lava Island
Accessible in Winter, No Water in High Water Channel

Crumbly Lava and Fissures
Required Careful Footing Placement

Fissure in Lava Atop Lava Island
Island is Remnant of 7000-Year Old Flow from Lava Butte

Empty High Water Channel at Lava Island

Impressive Witches' Broom
Infection From Mistletoe Causes Excess Growth

Another Crazy Witches Broom

Western Dwarf Mistletoe Causes Witches' Brooms

Ponderosa Framed Against the River
Red Osier Dogwoods in the Background

How Many Times Have I Taken This Shot?
Part of Big Eddy Snaking Through the Lava
Water Level is Low in Winter; Being Impounded in the Reservoirs

Massive Ponderosa Stump

At Big Eddy, Water Slamming into Lava
Deflecting to the Middle of the River

Something Zen About This Rock Garden

Dried Bloom Stalk from Woodland Pinedrops

This Female Common Merganser Swam Alongside for 15 Minutes

Females are Famous for Woody Woodpecker Tresses
Males Have Deep Green Smooth Heads

Scraggly Male Hairy Woodpecker
Using Tail as a Prop

Iron Oxide Red on Columnar Basalt in GoodDog!

The Rim Rock on a Gorgeous Day

Round Hole Called Tafoni
Unusual but not Rare in Basalt

So far, this has been the winter that was not: no snow on the mountains, no snowshoeing, and April-like days in January and February. Although the weather has been great for letting me hike through the winter, I fear for fire season.