My Thoughts on Wine

Not everyone has a taste for wine and even if they did, not everyone partakes in drinking. Nor should they just for the sake of appearing "cultured". But as a person steeped in the personal and professional development of a culinary education I have been called on to pick wines and/or pair them with food.

In the past I have been asked about my favorite wines for drinking, pairing, cooking, and how to tell the best! Repeatedly I would say "the wines YOU like the most!" because taste is subjective with wine as well as food and the pairing of both. 

Do you remember Two Buck Chuck? Sold only at Trader Joes? Those cheap wines that a lot of people just loved and raved about? According to The House of Mondavi it was surplus wine bought by the barrels at a discount from the Mondavi winery back in the day! The funny part is Robert Mondavi made fun of the guy but didn't realize the wine came from the over abundant harvest of his own grapes!

On a wine tasting tour in Napa Valley I partook in a class that was part of the tour experience at the Mondavi wineries. There is a technique, science, and steps to really "taste" a wine BUT the outcome of that experience is purely yours and not a "review" that everyone has to accept just because someone published it.

Robert Hodgson, a winemaker from California, conducted an eight year experiment at the California State Fair’s wine competition. Hodgson had this to say about the results..."The results are disturbing. Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year. Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win." ~ Wine-tasting: its junk science  

If your just looking to cook with wine, take the advice of your friends favorites or the flavor notes on the back of the bottle. Please don't use or buy "cooking wine" because they have salt in them and it will make it hard for you to balance the taste when you can't control the salt in the wine.

Leave wine snobbery to the "experts" if your just looking for a "take home" bottle suite your own tastes! If you want to wine taste and/or food pair wine, do what the experts do, "SPIT!". Wine tasting and/or judging was not developed for you to swallow every sample...but to narrow it down to the best! And then maybe enjoy a glass with dinner or special occasion.

Grilling with Cooling Racks

Here's a quick tip about grilling vegetables, small pieces of meat, fish, and anything you are afraid will fall thru the grill 'grates' or cracks. Use a cooling rack.

I like to grill thick slices of red onion rubbed with garlic, salted, and coated with olive oil. But if you ever have a problem flipping them...they fall thru the cracks easily. Small pieces of marinated salmon is another grilled item I like because not everyone wants a whole filet or they want 'just a taste'. And of course, another great grill item is hot-dogs.

You can buy some fancy special made high price 'gadgets' to use on your grill for these things or maybe you just need to order one or two cooling racks for around $15 to $20? (and sometimes you can find a 2 pack of nonstick cooling racks for around $10 at Walmart or Target).

My hot-dogs always come out great and they don't run away or get burnt! Unless of course, you leave them unattended for a long time as with anything over a fire.

**UPDATE - I bought two non-stick racks at the Jeff Road Kroger grocery store last week for $7.99 on sale. August 2020**

Small Bits

If your in the Huntsville Alabama area my church, Valley Fellowship, is having a picnic this Sunday and everyone is welcome! Service starts at 10am and the picnic is immediately afterword. 3616 Holmes Avenue NW, 35816. It's like potluck but we make sure enough meat is available: pulled pork, burgers, hotdogs...

I received my second 99 score from the health department! They just can't give me that last point! LOL! So far we have stayed 95 and above. I am NOT complaining!

Here's a picture of the small kids (preschool) lunch below. It's an Italian flat-bread sandwich with salami, pepperoni, ham, herb infuse extra virgin olive oil, and I bake the bread myself...But really it's probably the chips and cookie that sells it! We put it in a small to-go container because they feed them in the class room instead of trying to get them all in the cafeteria. Smart thinking. 

Pizza, Aluminum Foil, and Parchment Paper

📌 Originally posted August 2013 · Updated & expanded 2026 — This post still gets a ton of traffic, so I figured it was time to give it the full treatment it deserves.

Pizza, Aluminum Foil, and Parchment Paper

What I've Learned After All These Years

Let me set the scene. It's a Saturday night, I'm ready to make pizza, I go to grab the parchment paper — and it's gone. Not a single sheet left in the house.

Now at this point I've got dough rested, sauce made, toppings ready to go. I'm not stopping. So I did what any committed home pizza cook does: I improvised. I grabbed the aluminum foil and figured we'd see what happened.

That one Saturday night turned into one of the most-visited posts on this entire blog, which honestly still surprises me. But I get it — because the parchment vs. foil question comes up every time someone starts getting serious about homemade pizza. So let me give you the full picture, not just the original experiment.

Saturday night pizza — the experiment that started it all

Oven Potatoes or Hash Browns?

Really the 'hash browns' I am talking about are the kind you get at chick-fil-a. Round and flatter than a tator-tot these hash browns complete a breakfast plate we offer for lunch at VFCA. The picture is an elementary grade plate of scrambled eggs, hash browns, biscuit, and sausage gravy!

Today I decided to use real potatoes to do some oven 'fried' potatoes to go with breakfast for lunch. I have some tough critics! They wanted the processed hash browns more than the potatoes! I said, 'Look, these are REAL potatoes!'. Unfortunately they were not impressed...Sigh.

It reminds me of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution where the kids could not identify a real potato but they knew a crinkle cut fry was a 'potato'.