Wine Trail - Cooks Edition

You are probably wondering what this is all about. Wine Trail? It's a long story, but the bottom line is this website is mostly about cooking. If things go as planned it will grow with a number of recipes. But, we hope, not exactly your regular food blog.

The Short Story

We were talking with a young mother who happens to be the wife of a winemaker. Her name is April Nalle. We've known the winemaker, her husband Andrew Nalle, for some years now, and his father (Doug Nalle) even longer (since he was the original winemaker). We were drinking their wine and talking food. We shared some recipes with her and gave her some advice on things for her newlywed kitchen and for some reason she thought that we should have a food blog. We politely said we thought the world was full of food blogs. A while later, after more recipes and more apparently sage advice she said she wanted to share our recipes with her winery mailing list. We could suggest wine pairings. Thinking about it, we told her we could be convinced if we could set up a website where the emphasis was on technique. We'll never be Serious Eats or Cook's Illustrated or Milk Street or Alton Brown. But maybe somebody might learn something and find out how to do what has taken us some number of years to learn. We're still learning, but here we are.

Our style is long-winded. We want to tell you more than simple steps. If you enjoy it, let us know. If you have questions or found problems, let us know. If it has helped you in your cooking, let us know. You get the idea. We'll try to help. We'll mention products that we especially like just because we think they're great.

If you'd like an even longer 'about us' then check out the, yes, about us.

The Recipes

To start the recipes are ones we think pair well with wines from Nalle Winery. We expect people from their mailing list will get here first. (Hi folks, if you like this tell your friends!). Of course you don't have to drink Nalle wine to make these recipes, but having purchased their wines for some number of years we can tell you it is extremely high quality wine that pairs well with food. If you have a chance, buy some and see.

These won't just be short recipes, they will be little essays with pictures and hopefully useful tips. The pictures won't be fancy posed. This isn't an industry website, just some people making dinner.

In the future, we might add recipes not part of the Nalle mailing and maybe some from some other friends who own other wineries (we get around a bit).

We told April we'd do one or two recipes a mailing so as you are reading this, we started with two of our very most favorite recipes. Roast Chicken. But not just roast chicken, the chicken, the gravy, the mashed potatoes and a side trip to making stock out of the leftover bones. We do this every 2 to 3 weeks and think we've finally perfected it. We call it The Perfect Roast Chicken. AND The Sandwich. What we eat when we have home grown tomatoes. An amazing spin on a BLT (We substitute for the B and the L.)

We're adding as we go. Please enjoy.

April 2022