Happy 10 Year Anniversary to Gravel & Dine!
Wow, I really cannot believe it’s been 10 years. The blog all started with me remembering the cookbook I made Tory when she moved into her first house that had family favorites as well as some new easy meals for her. I wanted to be able to expand on that and consolidate nostalgic family recipes with the newer recipes I was trying and loving, but how do you make an expandable cookbook? Sure I could print or copy recipes and put them in a 3 ring binder, but I wanted something “fancier” than that. Well after letting that float around in my head for awhile I decided that the only truly dynamic solution was to create a blog!
Somehow I convinced Tory to join me on this journey and create and contribute recipes. While Tory is mostly “retired” from the blog at this point or maybe on an extended sabbatical, I do have to admit that she lasted longer than I would have bet in the very beginning.
Over the past 10 years we’ve posted some of our family favorites, we’ve tried new recipes and posted our adaptation to them and we’ve created completely brand new recipes as well. It’s been a fun hobby, a labor of love and a resource that I use often for inspiration and recipes.
This post celebrates our top 10 most popular recipes in terms of overall views.
Drumroll please………
This is the first mac ‘n cheese recipe that we posted and it truly is a classic combination. Mac n cheese is so versatile and begs for customization. Adding a nice smoky brisket along with some barbeque sauce with a tangy, sweet, vinegary flavor to cut some of the richness is one of my favorite combinations. Plus, whenever we smoke meats we fill up the smoker meaning we always have leftovers in the freezer. It’s perfectly set up for on demand mac n cheese.
If I were to look beyond the Top 10 and look at recipe categories, I think our waterfowl recipes would definitely be our most popular overall. I think it’s because overall the available recipes for wild game is smaller, more of a niche market if you will. While I love waterfowl, particularly duck, I’m also cooking for my mom at duck camp who doesn’t love it and Tory also isn’t the world’s biggest fan. But both of us believe in eating what you hunt, so Tory & I both strive to make our wild game very approachable. This waterfowl chili recipe of Tory’s is just perfect for that. You have all the wonderful, familiar flavors of chili with the minor change of adding duck. It’s perfect to sub in for beef because duck really is a dark meat.
8. Imitation Lobster (aka Poor Man’s Lobster)
Another recipe of Tory’s, this imitation lobster is a nostalgic recipe for both of us that we were inspired to post when we were preparing for a series of top fish & seafood recipes for Lent. As a child we never had lobster, probably didn’t even know what lobster was. It’s just not the type of food many people ate in our small town. But as kids we felt so fancy dipping this flaky white fish into melted butter.
Put the word copycat and a popular restaurant name in a recipe title and it’s a recipe for getting something on your top 10 list. Since we do our annual chick strip feast for New Year’s and it was minorly inspired by liking Cane’s, it also happened to be one of the first sauce recipes I made. It’s not a perfect copycat, nothing probably will be with the “secret sauces” out there but it has the quintessential pepper forward flavor of Cane’s sauce.
Another sauce I developed for chicken strip night. This was somewhat inspired by chicken wings but wanting to merge the flavors of the buffalo sauce tossed on wings with the blue cheese dressing served on the side. To sum it up – it’s just classic.
This or my dad’s smoked duck is the first wild game that I remember eating. Both have huge nostalgic value and so many memories attached to them. While we don’t try to “hide” the duck in this recipe the way we do in some meals, I honestly don’t think it needs it. A nice seasoned flour and frying the duck in butter, you end up with tender crunchy bite that I find irresistible.
4. Garlic Parmesan Butter Sauce
There sure are a lot of sauces that made the Top 10 list, I attribute that to New Year’s Eve and the many years that I spend introducing one or two new sauces each year. This one was inspired by The Well, a local bar where we like to go with a group and order a huge platter of their whole wings Naked and a variety of sauces on the side. It’s easier than negotiating. My favorite is the Garlic Parmesan sauce which isn’t mayo based like many others I’ve had when I’ve tried ordering Garlic Parmesan wings at other places and being royally disappointed. This is rich butter, garlic and salty/umami parmesan. Great as a dip on chicken strips or also on wings!
3. Pioneer Woman’s Brown Sugar Oatmeal Cookies
I was inspired to try this recipe because of my love of oatmeal cookies and I was intrigued by the idea of using all brown sugar in the cookie. Generally, brown sugar is slightly acidic which allows it to react more with baking soda and rise a bit more and it also contributes to a chewier vs crunchier cookie. I also love the extra richness and depth of flavor the molasses in the brown sugar brings. My favorite version of the cookie which I made later on was an Oatmeal Raisin version.
2. Dog Treats: Crunchy Bacon Drops
It amazes me that this recipe is the number two recipe on the blog. I mean it’s a super simple recipe and so many people (myself included) love to spoil their pets but there are so many fancy pet treat recipes out there cut into cute little bone shapes, why this one? Maybe it goes back to the super simple, approachableness of it. Either way, our family dogs are fans!
Three out of 10 recipes in our Top 10 list are wild game recipes! How cool is that?! When you consider we started this blog to preserve family recipes and memories, it is amazing to me how that has resonated with others in terms of recipe views. Wild game hunting is such an integral part of our heritage and the recipes have also become some of the most viewed recipe on the blog. We use slow cookers a lot at hunting camp because we can have a meal waiting for us when we come home, and this recipe with with it’s tangy, sweet and sourish type of flavor will have some familiar flavors that help make the wild game more approachable.
Thank you for sticking with us for these past 10 years of our adventure with Gravel and Dine! I don’t know what the next 10 years will bring but I am proud of what we have accomplished and published over the last 10 years. Not just the recipes but the memories Tory & I created on our blogging nights, the way it inspired our cooking even when recipes aren’t going on the blog and how it is has expanded our tastes and sense of adventure in food.
Leave a Reply