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.

Easter 2023

Ever since Ann's father passed away in 2016, we really haven't celebrated Easter all that much. With no family to cook for, it has seemed kind of pointless. This year, Rob and Dyce invited us over for Easter ham dinner which was much appreciated. It is very hard to find anyone who is willing to cook for me. People are intimidated by feeding a chef, but paradoxically, as a bunch we are just pretty happy to have anyone cook anything for us at any time.

Easter Sunday late afternoon we drove across the river to Rob and Dyce's house on a beautifully sunny day. We were greeted with delicious cocktails whose name I can no longer remember, if ever I knew. As I recall, they consisted of St. Germain, lime, mint, and sparkling wine. They were refreshingly delicious and worked well with Dyce's deviled eggs made with pickled jalapeños.

Deviled Eggs with Jalapeño

Going over to their house is always a treat for us in that we are guaranteed to get our dog fix in visiting with Lola and Reilly. We really miss our dogs and these two help with that. Lola's a crazy bundle of non-stop energy, while the smaller Reilly is much more sedate, but rules the roost.

Busted!

Reilly is Never Far From Rob

Rob smoked a Kurobuta (Berkshire) ham from Snake River Farms, a regional (next door in Idaho) purveyor of fine beef and pork. You'll see a lot of their products in high-end restaurants in this area.

Rob's Ham Fresh from the Smoker

Dyce made a salad to accompany the ham that was equally tasty and unusual. Don't quote me on this as I was too busy eating to dissect it, but I believe the salad was primarily shaved raw brussels sprouts, roasted artichoke hearts, cannellini, Italian parsley, and grated cheese (pecorino or Parmigiano) in a shallot vinaigrette.

Dyce's Salad of Brussels Sprouts, Cannellini, and Artichoke Hearts

Rob had asked me some weeks ago to make pommes Anna to accompany the ham. When he asked, neither he nor I knew that the vast majority of times that I have made pommes Anna at home, it has been for an Easter celebration. I determined this by looking at all the pommes Anna posts I have made over the years. Some coincidence!

I tried something new for this pommes Anna that I cannot recommend. Because we were having the potato dish at Rob and Dyce's house, I wanted to do the majority of cooking at our house and then finish it at theirs so that it would be hot for dinner. Pommes Anna cooks in two steps: first, covered to essentially steam the potatoes done and then uncovered, to dry them out a bit and finish the dish.

I decided to do the covered cooking at home and transport the potatoes to their house still covered and finish the uncovered cooking part in their oven. While in theory this was a good idea, in reality, during transport, the potatoes glued themselves to the bottom of my cast iron pan and would not release. I put the finished cake back together as well as I could, but it was a disappointing outcome. Now I know.

Pommes Anna with Yellow Potatoes

With the ham and potatoes, Rob opened a stunning dry Riesling from the Nahe, the 2020 Schäfer-Fröhlich Bockenauer Felseneck Riesling Grosses Gewächs. This was a first-class wine and a natural pairing with ham. Ham is a tricky dish to pair with wine because it is often very salty, smoky, or sweet, or really any combination of those three.

While Riesling is a great choice, we don't have any in the cooler from last summer, so what to bring? My pairing rule of thumb has always been, when in doubt: Pinot Noir. Because of the inherent sweetness of ham, I prefer a younger wine that still has a lot of its fruit, so I opted to bring a 2021 Patty Green Pinot Noir Estate Old Vine Ribbon Ridge, which is one of the best of the splendid 2021 Willamette Valley wines that we have tasted.

And finally, a few more photos.

As always, Ann and I so enjoyed our time with Dyce, Rob, and the girls. If we do it again, I won't be splitting the cooking of the pommes Anna between houses!

Roasted Stuffed Artichokes

Ann and I, we love artichokes but we rarely eat fresh ones, mainly relying on canned hearts. This is due to two things really: in our mountainous cold region, it is hard to find good quality artichokes and preparing artichokes (other than simply boiling them) is a lot of tedious work. In other words, it is only worth the effort to prep artichokes if they are great quality, which we never find.

Stuffed Roasted Artichokes

I shouldn't say never, because last week when I hit the store, they had a huge pile of giant green globe artichokes that were amazingly fresh. The cut ends were still fresh and green. And they were so new in the store that there were not any price signs displayed yet. I grabbed four huge chokes, price be damned. Looking at the receipt, they were less than $2 each.

Artichokes come from California where spring is the prime season, from March through May, but there is, in some years such as this, a fairly decent winter season as well. These artichokes showed evidence of frost, their outer petals bronzed and slightly blistered from the cold, but I have never been one to shy away from a vegetable because of its looks.

In fact, at the restaurant, we would take bushels of blemished vegetables from our growers to keep them from becoming pig or chicken food. Customers at the farmers markets wouldn't buy the ugly vegetables and fruit, but the look in no way impacts the flavor and it would be a shame to waste all that food.

Anyway, some marketing type at the big artichoke grower decided to turn the frostbitten artichokes into a "thing" and built a somewhat brilliant campaign around them. They're calling them "Frost Kissed" and claim that they taste better because of the cold weather. I could care less. A beautiful fresh artichoke is a beautiful fresh artichoke, regardless of the color of the bits that you have to trim off anyway. But where I win is that their marketing campaign has made it such that our retail grocer is willing to bring them in so that I and other artichoke hounds can buy them.

Boiling artichokes and having each diner peel his own can be fun, but when I have really fresh and beautiful artichokes, I want to roast them to help bring out the nuttiness. I decided that I would trim the toughest parts of the leaves off the artichokes, peel down the stems, and cut them in half vertically.

After using a spoon to scrape out the chokes from on top of the hearts and using my fingers to pull out the prickly inner leaves topped with pink and purple thorns, I stuffed the artichokes with a mix of whole peeled garlic cloves, capers, and chopped Italian parsley, topped with a pat of butter. Then I drizzled the artichokes with extra virgin olive oil and a sprinkling of salt, then put a slice of lemon atop each.

Artichoke Halves Stuffed with Peeled Garlic Cloves, Capers, and
Italian Parsley, Topped with Butter, Lemon, and Olive Oil

After covering the pan with aluminum foil to help steam the artichokes, I put them into a moderate (350F) oven for an hour. Then I mixed up a bit of panko, grated pecorino romano, and a bit of fennel pollen with a glug of olive oil. I spooned this mixture onto the artichokes and ran them under the broiler for a minute or two to brown nicely. Et voilà!

After Broiling the Panko Mix

Artichokes are a lot of work, no doubt. But taking advantage of really fresh artichokes makes that work really rewarding.

Note to Self: Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Here's an impromptu dish from last evening that Ann is raving about and wants me to make again, which I will never do if I don't document it, because it, like so many thousands of dishes I have cooked in the past, will escape the tenuous confines of my feeble mind for the vast ether.

Roasted Chicken with Artichokes, Lemon, and Garlic

Olive oil in the pan, chicken thighs, peeled garlic cloves, salt and pepper, artichoke hearts, lemon slices, Italian parsley, rosemary, olive oil drizzle over; roast 400 until done. Voilà! That's all the recipe a chef needs.

Alaska Day 16: Return to McMinnville

In our hotel room in Anchorage, getting up to the annoying alarm on my phone at 0445 was no joke. Given that we were all packed except for our toiletries and sleep clothes, we brushed our teeth, finished packing, and were in the hotel lobby by 0500 only to discover that it was pouring rain. I walked down the street to fetch the car and we loaded our luggage under the cover of the hotel portico.

We had no issues getting gas or returning the rental car. We would have had issues if I had followed the directions to the rental car return on the Garmin, but despite the obnoxiously early hour, I had enough wits about me to know that we needed to return the car to the garage where we got it and not to whatever office the Garmin wanted us to visit. At 0520 there was nobody in the garage, so we left the car in the return lane and dropped the keys into the drop box.

Inside the terminal at the Air Alaska counters, there were good lines to check baggage with a lot of people trying to get bulky and overweight items through, especially guys making their commute to the North Slope oil fields. Baggage dealt with, security was a non-issue and there was a coffee stand just on the other side of the screeners. Coffee, finally, a few minutes before six.

Masked and Seated at 0645: An Exhausted Camper

We boarded without issue and we had front-row seats in first class going back. I joked with Ann that it was a very different experience than flying co-pilot in a Cessna bush plane, which we both did on our respective flights to Katmai. The climb out through the low rain clouds was uneventful. I expected worse. Above the clouds between 10-15,000 feet, we had a touch of clear air instability, but it was trivial in the grand scheme of air turbulence. Above the clouds, we had sunshine all the way into PDX, but terrifically warm temperatures when we arrived.

Check Out the Flat "Meat" Product

We preordered breakfast the day before and it proved to be somewhat edible. Ann’s omelette came with a dubious flat meat product reeking of artificial smoke. She did not partake of that particular delicacy. I preordered a pork bowl consisting of layers of black beans, shredded pork shoulder, scrambled eggs, all topped with a bit of sour cream. The eggs and pork shoulder were lame, while the black beans were nicely seasoned with salt and cumin. It might have been a touch better had it been warm all the way through.

My Breakfast was Slightly Better Than Ann's

Back at PDX, we had to wait on the tarmac for a few minutes before pulling to a gate. Like everybody else in these days of COVID, Alaska Air was having staffing difficulty. We needed a ground crew to help park the plane. Ten minutes or so of wait was enough to get us to the gate. The half-hour wait for our baggage at PDX was excruciating. All we wanted to do was get home.

Baggage in hand, we needed to get back to the Ramada to get my truck and start the trip back home. We called the shuttle number only to find out that the shuttle was not in operation, another COVID issue, I imagine. The hotel called an Uber for us and the driver met us within seconds of us getting to the pick-up area. That couldn't have gone any smoother.

The trip from the airport home was as easy as it gets and that is a major blessing from the Portland traffic gods. We skipped the ride into Portland on I-84, opting to take the I-205 bypass which dropped us on I-5 just about Wilsonville. It was a smooth ride on a route that we do not normally take.

During the hour drive home, we decided to stop at the store and grab a few things for an early dinner. After over two weeks of really pretty bad food, we were desperate for a competent meal. We needed something flavorful yet comforting, comforting being our code word for high carbs, preferably pasta. You really don't know how hard it is trying to eat well and foregoing pasta for months on end. We could live quite happily on pasta every day.

We stopped at the local Grocery Outlet, a small store that is far quicker to get in and out of than the big grocery store. GO, being primarily a seller of overstocked goods, usually has at least one kind of Italian bronze die-extruded pasta on the shelves. The markup on these pastas at specialty groceries is unbelievable and so a lot of unsold pasta gets farmed out to the overstock sellers. At our GO, we usually will not have a choice of brand or cut, but at least we can get a bag of decent pasta, unlike the grocery where Barilla is as good as it gets. Today it was fettuccine.

Grocery Outlet is only a couple minutes from the house and groceries in tow, we were in a rush to see the dogs. If you've ever been away from yours, you know the enthusiastic greeting that you get after you've been in the bathroom for a minute. Imagine the greeting after two-and-a-half weeks away!

That's a Happy Pile of Puppies!

We had planned to have an early dinner, but not eating anything since o-dark-thirty, we moved things up and I got to work making our dinner. Along with the pasta, we got a head of broccoli to put with artichoke hearts and sun-dried tomatoes from the pantry, garlic, red pepper flakes, and a big handful of fresh basil which exploded in the garden while we were away. A swirl of butter and a grating of pecorino romano finished our super flavorful and comforting dinner, easily the best meal we’ve had in three weeks.

And that concludes the saga of our 2021 Alaska trip. I'll do a brief wrap-up post next.

A Visit from Home

A very long time ago, in grade school back in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, I played on the school soccer team for a couple of years with my buddy Chris. We both lived a very long way out in the county (and at that time, country) and were destined the following year (tenth grade) to attend Albemarle County High School, located on the outskirts of town, a 45-minute bus ride for me.

The student population was overflowing the high school, so the County built a new school much closer to Chris' house than to mine. The County then had to divide the students between the two schools. Chris was a lock-in to attend the new Western Albemarle High School. My situation was up in the air for some months: the dividing line would be right next to my house, one side or the other. Ultimately, the County decided that I would stay at the old high school. 

Had I lived another couple hundred yards down my country road, Chris and I would be be both headed for the new school. But fate would not have it so. The issue quickly became moot however, because at the end of my ninth grade year, just before the high school split, my father took a job in Alabama. Adios Virginia and all my friends.

Fast forward three years later, when I headed back to Charlottesville from Alabama to attend the University of Virginia. Who would be in my dorm but Chris? How crazy that we should both select the same college and be assigned, out of 20 or so freshman dorms, to the very same one! College being what it is, after first year, we developed different interests and went different ways.

Now add another 30 years or so to the tally and you find me in my restaurant in Winchester, Virginia. A customer of mine approached me about a friend of hers who made chicken pot pies to sell and who needed a commercial kitchen in which to make them so as not to fall afoul of the Health Department. My customer asked if her friend, Perrin, might rent my kitchen on Sundays when I was closed.

We set up a meeting between Perrin and me and I was already working at my desk on some paperwork when I heard the front door chime. Perrin walked in, introduced herself in her over-the-top ebullient manner, and said that her husband Chris would be coming in.

In walks this guy, totally backlit in the doorway with the dining room lights off. But something feels very familiar about him. He walked into the light and I looked at him and he looked at me and boom! Chris and I were together again. And it turned out that he and Perrin lived not five houses away from mine, not that I would know it, working all day and all night every day at the restaurant.

Perrin ended up renting the kitchen for a short while and then I ended up hiring her and one of her great friends, my next door neighbor Shawn, as lunch line cooks. Some time after that ran its course, Perrin and Chris decided it was time for a change and moved to Whitefish, Montana. They became friends there with Robert, my next door neighbor from grad school at Texas A&M. Clearly you can tell that this is a story about intersecting lives and fate.

After Whitefish, Chris and Perrin moved on to Portland for better employment opportunities for Chris, a school teacher. Then I retired from the restaurant business and decided to get into the wine business, as a pretty easy transition from the restaurant. After surveying the wine producing areas of the US, Ann and I decided on the Willamette Valley in Oregon where we currently live, about thirty miles south of where Chris and Perrin live.

Although Ann spent a decade in Winchester, she never got the chance to meet Chris and Perrin before they relocated west. But Ann and Perrin did manage to hit it off on the telephone. The two of them are very alike, two peas in the proverbial pod. In terms of outgoing personality, they could be sisters. Chris and I are much more reserved and let our wives handle the communication and planning.

Now that we are all four living in Oregon, we see each other when we can, which has been impossible during COVID, but is easing up now that Ann and I are retired.

Living in wine country, we get lots of tourists from all over coming to sample our world-class wines. Everybody wants to visit us and coming to wine country provides a great excuse for Perrin, Shawn, and I, old neighbors and colleagues, to get together and relive the old days. And drink a bunch of great Pinot Noir!

In July of this year, with COVID loosening its grip on the country and air travel, Perrin planned a girls' vacation for several of her friends from back home Winchester, the town where I lived for 25 years and in which my two daughters were born. Naturally, the girls planned to rendezvous with us in wine country where we would taste some wine, then head back to our house for more of the same and some munchies.

Maysara Winery Tasting Room Entrance

They left the choice of wineries up to Ann and me. Given that they were coming to wine country on a Monday, many wineries were closed. Add to this that many wineries are short-staffed because of COVID and even more wineries than normal were closed on Monday. Fortunately, we have hundreds of wineries within a short drive of the house.

We chose to visit Maysara Winery. They always do a nice job with their tastings and are a good introduction to Willamette Valley Pinot Noir for visitors. And they are located in a picturesque hollow between lots of hills, many planted to vines, others allowed to be what they have been for a very long time, a wildlife haven of Oregon White Oak savannah.

Maysara Tasting Room

The Weather Was Gorgeous

Shawn, Ann, Perrin, Catherine, Bridget, and Kelly

A Charcuterie Board

Perrin and Ann, Two Peas in a Pod

On the Patio in the Shade of Corkscrew Willows

Wild Turkeys at Maysara

After our tasting and catching up for a couple of lazy hours while sitting under the trees on a beautiful day, we went inside to buy some wine and have some shipped back to Virginia. And then we headed the 20 minutes back to our house in McMinnville to drink more wine and eat some munchies out on the front patio.

Dips: Artichoke Tapenade, Piquillo-White Bean, and Black Bean

After getting out of the restaurant business, I have finally figured out that it is way more important to me to spend time with my guests rather than to spend all my time in the kitchen cooking for them. What good is it if people come to visit you and you're stuck in the kitchen the whole time?

Accordingly, the day before, I made three different dips that we served with pita and tortilla chips. I put them out on the counter before we left for Maysara so that they would be at room temperature when we returned. They weren't high cuisine, but they were just what the doctor ordered for an informal afternoon gathering on the porch.

Charlie Took Right to Kelly

It was really great to catch up with everyone from back home and to show off to them our fantastic Willamette Valley Pinot Noir.