The Prairie Homestead

Homesteading | Self Sufficient Living | Living off the Land

Jill Winger

7 Comments | |    Last Updated: March 28, 2024

How to Revive an Old Sourdough Starter (even if it’s been months)

There’s this thing I like to do where I put my sourdough starter in the fridge and forget about it for 6-8 months.... Call it laziness... call it "too busy"... Call it a character flaw... But I am who I am, friends. Anyway. A few months ago I extricated a very horrible looking sourdough starter from the depths of my fridge. As I attempted to revive it, I realized that perhaps, a handful of you may also be an unfit sourdough ...Continue Reading

1 Comment | |    Last Updated: April 22, 2024

Parenting by Subtraction

“Are you SURE we can’t help it??” My son peered anxiously into the incubator as the little beak poked through the pea-sized hole in the shell. The project started 3 weeks prior when my two youngest children (8 and 11) carried four goose eggs into the house with a pleading look. “Pleeeeease mom… can we incubate them?” Our female goose had built a half-hearted nest before deciding she'd rather spend her days cavorting with her ...Continue Reading

1 Comment | |    Last Updated: November 4, 2025

Simple Crowd-Pleasing Chili

Chili is such a polarizing dish. Popular? Yes. But everyone has strong opinions as to what makes the best chili.... Beans or no beans? Tomato or no tomato? Spicy or mild?  And that's just the beginning... But at the end of the day, debates aside, chili is one of my favorite ways to serve a crowd, especially when time is short. It's easy to get paralyzed by the myriad of possible chili ingredients. But over the years ...Continue Reading

6 Comments | |    Last Updated: February 29, 2024

Impossible Arrogance

“We can continue to improve [our meatless product] now until forever, and the cow is not going to get any better at being meat.” -Patrick Brown, Founder of Impossible Foods during an interview with Vox We recently sat down as a family to watch You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment on Netflix… It wasn’t until halfway through the first episode that I realized it was a propaganda piece for artificial ...Continue Reading

3 Comments | |    Last Updated: April 1, 2024

Unlocking the Wheat Berry Puzzle

My whole grain journey has come full circle. When I first experimented with baking bread over a decade ago, I was determined I would use 100% whole wheat or nothing at all. (I have a bit of an all-or-nothing personality...) And it was a complete DISASTER. In fact, my family was so traumatized by my inedible bread bricks that they swore off whole wheat for many years. I quickly realized that if I had any hope of switching them over ...Continue Reading

3 Comments | |    Last Updated: February 16, 2024

Why We’re Selling the Soda Fountain

I dropped a bit of a bombshell on social media beforehand...Yes, we’re selling the soda fountain. The announcement surprised a lot of people and since many of you have been following the soda fountain's story from the beginning, I wanted to share the behind-the-scenes of this decision today. In case you need to catch up on our soda fountain journey, check out these: We Bought a 107 Year Old Restaurant (video) Getting Ready ...Continue Reading

Nice to Meet You

I’m Jill. I’ve never been very good at following prescribed paths.

For the last 15 years, that instinct has led me through homesteading, entrepreneurship, and creating a life my younger self could have only dreamed of.

These days, I’m less interested in living the perfect "old-fashioned life" and more interested in knowing which ideas are worth carrying forward. The first half of this story was about building a homestead. The next part is about building a life that actually fits.
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