Making a persistent change to the PATH environment variable in Windows Nano was harder than expected. I found many forum/blog posts that had different PowerShell scripts to append to PATH that would work in older versions of windows but not in Nano. I finally found the following script works in Nano:
Set-ItemProperty -Path ‘HKLM:\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment’ -Name PATH -Value $($env:Path + ";C:\chef\bin")
Now I can access the Chef executables from any path. You will need to open a new PowerShell session to use the new path because the environment variables are loaded at the beginning of the session.