I don’t cook like I used to. 

Actually, let me rephrase that. I cook a ton. I own a restaurant, and I just finished the manuscript for my second cookbook (it’s coming in October—eek). I cook every single day for many people.

But my personal cooking rhythms have drastically changed over the years.

I don’t know why that’s surprised me. I guess I naively assumed I’d be in the same little kitchen pattern forever. But life changes, and I now find myself with three (busy) older children, shifting businesses, and a more community-focused life than I ever envisioned.

The common belief, if you live a life like mine, is that home-cooked food isn’t possible…

…which is a rational and reasonable train of thought. Yes, it’s certainly harder to cook when you’re not home all day. And yes, I succumb to convenience more than I used to.

But the tension for me is that I still like cooking. I still love the process. And I still stand by the fact that it saves money, tastes better, and is healthier for us.

It just has to be on my terms these days… which means that anyone else’s system, spreadsheet, app, or color-coded meal plan absolutely does NOT work right now.

(Okay, let’s be honest— they’ve never worked for me… even in my most classic homemaker-ish era… but especially not now.)

So how DOES one cook in the midst of a somewhat full and slightly feral life?

I’m so glad you asked.

I don’t know.

Kidding… sort of. I’m actually do have some answers for you. Maybe.

But the answer certainly hasn’t been to strategically prep seven coordinated meals in matching glass containers on Sunday evening with pretty labels which I store in a spotlessly clean and organized refrigerator.

(Not only NO, but my fridge resembles a war zone complete with half-wilted celery, unidentified leftovers, and mysterious mason jars full of things I swore I didn’t need to label.)

Anyway, I’ve started to realize the problem wasn’t necessarily me. (Okay, maybe it is me… but I digress.)

 

The problem was me trying to force my life into a system that only works when the schedule is tidy and predictable. And my life is NEVER tidy or predictable.

So I decided to cook in a way that fits the life I actually have.

And that required a considerable flipping of the script. Aka: I don’t start with a recipe; I start with the ingredients that are in my fridge, pantry, freezer, or garden.

Yes, I realize that may sound obvious to some of you, but I don’t actually think it is. If it were, people across the country wouldn’t still be standing in front of their fridge every evening wondering what to make for dinner.

But this little, perhaps obvious shift, is everything. A pound of ground beef (or random bowls of browned beef left in the fridge) can become tacos, pasta, soup, a skillet meal, or something involving potatoes (always, always potatoes) if that’s the kind of day we’re having.

A bowl of leftover rice is a head start— not a cast-off.

The lingering veggies in the produce drawer can be rescued with a hot pan, a jar of broth, generous amounts of garlic, or a handful of cheese.

Basically, I’ve stopped asking, “What recipe am I making tonight?” and ask, “What can these random, somewhat eclectic ingredients become?”

It’s such a simple shift, but it’s changed everything. And it’s made me a better cook, too. Because when you stop needing an exact recipe for every meal, you start to see the patterns:

Soup is a pattern.

Tacos are a pattern.

Pasta is a pattern.

Hash is a pattern.

Once you know the patterns, you can just start building, and cooking becomes a fluid (dare I say magical?) process that borders more on art than science. It’s also how you get closer to that elusive, ever-mysterious “grandma cooking style,” where everything is measured by heart and tastes amazing with no recipe in sight.

 

You see, most of us were taught how to follow recipes, but NOT how to think in meals. How to open the fridge and spot possibilities. How to work with what we have instead of constantly running to the supermarket. How to turn a chaotic evening into a decent dinner anyway.

And THAT kind of real-life kitchen confidence is worth so much more than another pretty meal plan printable.

Now, just to be clear—I’m not anti-planning. But my planning has to be painless, (which means if it takes more than 90 seconds, I’m out). I can muster the energy to I write out the next two or three days’ worth of rough dinner ideas at the top of my planner. That’s it.

But because I think in patterns—not color-coded shopping lists or rigid recipes—it takes hardly any brainpower, which deeply matters to me these days.

My other big shift: I’ve stopped expecting every meal to be ultra creative.

Many of us have absorbed the idea that being a good cook means constantly reinventing the wheel—new recipes, new flavors, new ideas. But real-life cooking is far less glamorous than that. It’s repeating yourself a lot, relying on a handful of fallback meals, using up what’s in the fridge before it dies a slow death, and figuring out how to turn leftovers nobody wants into something people will actually eat. Mostly, it’s learning to make peace with “good enough” more often than your fantasy self would prefer.

But oddly enough, I’ve discovered I prefer cooking this way more than anything else. There’s a sort of alchemy to it that inspires me—the challenge of looking at what I have, knowing the constraints, and still making something good out of it.

 

That, more than anything, is why I built Meal Craft.

It didn’t come from some color-coded kitchen fantasy. It came from years of attempting to answer the same question over and over again: how do I feed people well when life is full, I only go to the grocery store twice a month, and I’m operating in a near-constant state of decision fatigue?

Eventually, I realized I didn’t need more recipes. I needed a different way to think about supper.

A way to look at what I already had and turn it into dinner without needing a brand-new Googled recipe, a perfect grocery haul, or some imaginary reserve of mental energy I did not possess that day.

That has been far more useful to me than rigid meal planning ever was.

So if you’ve struggled with meal plans in the past, maybe you don’t need a stricter system or more willpower.

Maybe you simply need a plan with a little more grace woven into it…

One that flows with real life…

One that helps you look at what you already have and say, okay… now what can this become?

If this way of cooking sounds like the kind of relief you’ve been craving, that’s exactly why I made Meal Craft. It’s the frameworks and systems I use to make supper work in the middle of real life, and maybe it’ll help you do the same.

—Jill

The post My Anti-Meal Planning Manifesto appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

Man, do I love efficiency.

I always have.

If I can make something more streamlined, less clunky, and even faster, that’s my love language. And I suppose it’s the love language of our modern world, too.

It can be a beautiful, useful impulse.

Until it isn’t.

After I published my last essay about celebrating humanity in the things we create, someone emailed me about a Bible camp they’d attended, where the curriculum they used was prepackaged videos and scripted lessons. The writer of the email wondered how effective it could truly be and if the kids could find meaning in something that felt so impersonal and canned.

The same day, a friend emailed to tell me about someone they knew who was so excited to discover that AI could edit their book manuscript. My friend shared her sadness at what might be lost when words aren’t shaped and crafted by human hands.

I nodded my head to each of these emails, while also feeling a rumbling sense of uneasiness.

Easy vs. hard.

Human vs. machine.

Meaningful effort vs. wasted time.

The kind of struggle that shapes you vs. the kind of struggle you should be outsourcing.

How do we know the difference? How do we find the balance? Can we have our easy cake and eat it too?

This is a non-stop wrestling match for me. And I’ve come to the conclusion that, once again, two things can be true at once.

This isn’t binary. It’s not “easy good, hard bad,” or vice versa.

I find the question I’m asking these days isn’t whether choosing efficiency is right or wrong, but rather:

Where are shortcuts serving me, and where are they flattening something that brings color and depth to my life?

And like anything juicy and useful in life, the answer is always: It depends.

Sigh. That’s my least favorite answer. Black and white is so much nicer… But the gold is always found in the gray.

You see, what’s right for you in the easy vs. hard debate will look different depending on the person, the stage of life, and the situation.

There is no simple formula.

For example, I have a little bot on Instagram that sends people information when they ask about a specific podcast or one of my online courses. (It’s not AI—just an automation.) It saves me HOURS each month of cutting and pasting the same replies over and over. It helps me serve people better and keeps me from spending dozens of hours in my DMs, which isn’t great for my mental health (or my eyesight). In that case, I’m thrilled to hit the “easy” button and let Mr. Robot do the repetitive work.

On the flip side…

I’ve been a content creator since 2010 and have tried countless “easy breezy content systems” over the years. In the past, if a guru told me they could help me turn one idea into fifty pieces of content, I’d beg them to take my money. I’ve signed up for more of those programs than I can remember.

Do those systems work?

Technically, yes. And they can indeed produce mountains of content.

But every single time, they fall flat for me. The material I’ve produced through them has been content, sure… but it always feels like it’s missing something and no one interacts with it. People can feel the difference.

And so, I continue to produce my content the old-fashioned, rather inefficient way: I create bits and pieces for each individual platform… and almost always, the things I create in the heat of the moment, the off-the-cuff observations, and the slightly unhinged sermons I write in my head in the shower at 10:37pm resonate the most.

I couldn’t optimize the process if I tried… and I’ve since realized I don’t want to.

This same tension shows up in my restaurant.

A restaurant has a billion moving pieces and there are some aspects where I BEG for convenience. We started using reservation software for our dinner nights a few months ago, and it has been a LIFESAVER. I have zero desire to manage 60 reservations each night manually.

But at the same time, I refuse to put QR codes on the tables for people to use as menus.

I could if I wanted to. I know how to do it. And it’d certainly save my staff time by not having to deliver menus to each table.

But I want people to hold the menu. I want my young servers to connect with guests when they walk in. I want the guests to feel seen. I want there to be at least one tiny pocket of life left where not everything has been frictionlessly optimized into a screen. I want the experience of dining with us to feel human.

And so, I contradict myself. A lot.

Sometimes people accuse me of being a hypocrite… which makes me laugh and say, “Well duh!”

I will absolutely preach efficiency in one breath and choose deliberate inconvenience in the next.

I will buy store-bought tortillas to save time one day, while making a loaf of sourdough bread that requires a 10-hour rise the next.
I will automate repetitive DMs while refusing to let AI turn one podcast into 89 pieces of content.
I will use software to book restaurant tables, edit my photos, and build sales pages while simultaneously rejecting QR code menus.
I will streamline one part of life and purposely keep another part gloriously inefficient.

And it bothers me zero percent.

The point isn’t to form a rigid philosophy we can apply across every square inch of our lives. Rather, the point is to be awake enough to notice what certain shortcuts are stealing from our lives.

Is technology removing meaningless friction from my days? Or removing meaning from my life altogether?

Is it protecting my energy so I can use it elsewhere? Or simply saving time so I can spend more hours scrolling my phone?

Perhaps one of the strange luxuries of being alive in this modern moment is that we get to choose. Our ancestors couldn’t opt out of most hardships, but we can. And we can also decide to opt-in to meaningful struggle when it makes sense.

We get to decide when convenience is a gift and when it is a thief. We get to decide which frictions are worth removing, and which ones give shape and meaning to our days.

And we get to remember: not every hard thing is holy. But not every easy thing is harmless either.

More Deep Thoughts on Modernity:

• In Defense of Imbalance
• The Cost of Cheap Information
• When Modernity Leaves Us Wanting
• Being Old-Fashioned on Purpose
• When the Old Ways Make More Sense

The post Easy isn’t Always Better, but Hard isn’t Always Holier appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

The only way I’m surviving this current season of life?

Writing everything down.

That’s it. That’s the post.

To say life is full is an understatement. There’s a lot of transitions behind the scenes, and some big shifts coming that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet—but I will soon.

For now, I’ll just say this: my brain has been going a hundred miles an hour, and the short-term memory loss I’ve joked about having is feeling more real than ever. If I don’t write something down, it’s gone with the wind. Instantly.

Appointments, projects, ideas, millions of basketball practices, piano lessons, 4-H meetings, conversations, SOPs, processes, what I’m making for supper, what I need to order… etc, etc, etc.

I’ve been using EVERY text-capturing method at my disposal lately:

The Notes app on my phone.
Google docs (which I organized last night because the folders were a disaster).
Post-it notes. Everywhere.
My journals (I have three going simultaneously right now).
The backs of envelopes.

But most of all, my planner.

I’ve been using the list pages in the front like nobody’s business. The blank pages in the back are filling up with plans, brain dumps, and moving pieces. The monthly and weekly spreads are catching appointments, to-dos, deadlines, and all the little things that would otherwise circle my brain at 3 a.m. and steal my sleep.

This is not about “look how organized I am…” It’s about: “this is how I’m keeping the wheels on.”

(And yes, I know this may sound convenient coming from someone who sells a planner. But I write about what I’m actually living, and this is very much it…)

It’s also why I created this planner in the first place 5+ years ago.

I didn’t need something cute.

I didn’t need something to decorate with stickers and markers.

I wasn’t trying to build the perfect routine. (What even is that, anyway?)

I created it because I needed a place to hold real life. The kind of life that is layered and messy and full of moving pieces.

I needed something sturdy enough to help carry the mental load with me. And right now, I’m so grateful I have it.

So this is partly me sharing a real snapshot of my life lately, and partly me telling you: if you’ve got a hundred tabs open in your head and trying to hold a lot together this season, I get it.

And if your brain feels anything like mine at the moment, the 2026 Old-Fashioned on Purpose Planner is 26% off right now.

It has the pieces I come back to over and over again: tabbed months, hourly weekly pages, list sections, project planning pages, room for goals and notes, meal planning, garden and seed tracking, food production logs, and space for all the things life hands us.

It’s practical. It’s durable. And it’s not precious. It’s a workhorse, which is exactly what we all need right now.

So that’s the real snapshot from my little corner of the world.

A little messy. A little full. A lot of writing things down.

And for this season at least, I’m grateful to have somewhere to set it all down.

-Jill

P.S. Yes, I know it’s March. But it’s not too late to still get a ton of value from the planner. Plus, it’s 26% off, so that helps.

The post The Only Way I’m Surviving Right Now appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

A quaint little business on Main Street in a small town.

It’s the stuff Hallmark movies are made of.

The historic building, creaky floors, foot traffic, nostalgia, community… we loooove to romanticize it.

After reviving the oldest operating soda fountain in the state of Wyoming, I can tell you firsthand that yes, there is something deeply meaningful about bringing an old place back to life.

Yet, like most things we romanticize from a distance, it’s usually a whole lot less romantic up close.

Since buying the soda fountain five years ago, I’ve had a lot of people ask about following in my footsteps. I usually get a little tongue-tied at that point, because there’s so much I want to say, I don’t know where to begin. So today I pulled together a few of the thoughts that feel most important. Here we go:

1. You’ve got to solve a problem.

Not a fake problem. A real problem.

That’s true for any business, but especially one in a tiny town with limited patrons.

You see, the dream usually goes like this:

I love this thing sooooo much that surely everyone else will love it too and I’ll make millions from it.

Occasionally that works. Usually it doesn’t.

Just because something is cute, charming, artisanal, or personally exciting to you does not mean people are going to buy enough of it to keep your lights on.

I know that sounds harsh. But it’s true. Some things are simply better left as hobbies, side projects, or creative outlets.

People will say they want the candles, the soaps, the cheese, the darling little handmade things. They’ll tell you your idea is adorable. They’ll say, “This town needs that!”

And they probably mean it in the moment…

But there’s a big difference between what people say they want and what they’ll actually buy on a consistent basis. (Or what you can sell enough of to stay in business…)

That’s the part a lot of dreamers miss.

A small-town business must fill a real need. It must give people a reason to come back again and again. Because (I’m going to hold your hand when I say this) you cannot build a business on pity purchases.

When money gets tight or the novelty wears off, people stop buying the artisanal soap or goat cheese… Random requests do not equal demand. Compliments do not equal sales. And three people saying, “You should open one of those!” is not market research.

2. Respect the history—but listen to your gut.

When you buy an established business in a small town, you’re stepping into a story.

All the people who came before you have history with that place. And boy oh boy do they have opinions.

They remember what used to be there. They have pictures of their grandma standing in that building when she was eight years old. They remember what color the booths were in 1972. They remember the “right” way things were done, and they will tell you about it. Over and over and over again.

And it matters. History matters. Memory matters. A sense of place matters. There’s nothing worse than someone who stomps into a place with zero reverence for what came before.

But what people don’t realize is that there’s usually a reason the old thing became old. A reason it stopped working. A reason it started to dwindle.

There’s a reason the soda fountain was fading before we bought it. (Many reasons, actually…)

And if I had kept it on that exact same path—like many people wanted me to do—it would be dead by now.

That’s the part small towns often do not understand: if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

So yes, listen to the old-timers, take the history into consideration, absorb the stories…. But then? Trust your gut to bring the building or business or whatever into the future so it can continue to exist.

It’s very possible to honor what came before while still casting a vision for what comes next. Lean into the nostalgia, but don’t let it be your only compass.

3. Diversify. Or else.

In a small-town business, one income stream is usually not enough. Actually, that’s good advice for any business.

It’s rare that you can rely on one format, one offer, or one version of the business to carry the whole thing. Instead? Build layers.

For us, that looks like offering our signature burgers and shakes during the day, then transforming the Fountain into a magical supper club one or two nights per month. We’ve also dabbled in catering and special events and will continue to do so.

Remember—not every part of the business has to do the same job. Some parts bring consistency, some bring margin, some create buzz, some bring in a totally different customer. But when you combine them all you have something resilient, and that matters greatly in a small town.

4. Market to out-of-towners, too.

I adore our locals.

I love greeting them by name when they walk in the door. I love starting their order before they sit down because I know it by heart. I love that we have breakfast specials named after our coffee guys. There’s something sacred about that level of familiarity.

But if it depended only on locals, the Soda Fountain would have died a long time ago.

As much as I hate Interstate 25, it’s one of the main reasons the Fountain is still alive. We need the travelers and the tourists and the day-trippers. And you can bet I do everything I can to bring them in, too.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of the traffic to our fancy supper nights comes from out of town. We regularly have people drive three or four hours to dine with us. We’ve even had people fly in for them.

Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly…) that has created some tension. Some locals have accused us of catering to outsiders (I guess that’s a bad thing??). And some have insisted the business is no longer “for them.”

But I disagree. A business can love its town deeply and still need people from beyond it to survive. Those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

5. Create an experience.

Your customers aren’t just buying food or products or services—they’re buying a feeling.

The world is full of cookie-cutter franchises, strip malls, chain stores, fluorescent lighting, and sterile sameness. It’s BORING.

We want story. We want atmosphere. We want to be delighted. We want something that feels real and human in a world that feels flat and copy-pasted.

THAT, my friend, is the secret sauce.

Word of mouth has been wildly effective for the Soda Fountain, and that’s true for any business.

But people don’t talk about things that are expected and “fine” and the same.

They talk about things that are memorable.
They talk about things that surprised them.
They talk about things that made them feel something.
They talk about things that gave them a story to tell on the drive home.

My little Soda Fountain doesn’t just sell food. It sells nostalgia. A memory. A break from modern life. A small town story people want to step inside for an hour. That’s what makes it worth talking about.

And if you can intentionally weave those experiences into your business, no matter what kind it is, everything changes.

6. Lean into your liabilities.

Friend, you don’t want to be normal. That’s the LAST thing you want. Normal is forgettable.

Whatever makes you different, even if it drives you crazy…. even if a business consultant says it’s crazy… OWN IT. All of it.

Sometimes the very thing you’re tempted to downplay is the very magic you’ve been looking for.

I’ll tell you what—no one is going to forget the name Chugwater. That’s memorable. A mint-green soda fountain in the middle of brown-prairie-rural-Wyoming is memorable. Wendell the Antique Elk is memorable. Our ancient rotary phone that you have to yell into to be heard is memorable.

In a world full of generic, there is power in being distinct.

So instead of trying to hide your oddball parts, play them up. Make them part of your story. That’s my favorite sort of magic.

7. Don’t listen to your customers too much.

Yeah, I know. Sounds rude. Hear me out.

The customer is not always right.

Or maybe more accurately: customers are often right about what they want, but not right about the ramifications of providing it.

They’ll want you to have longer hours. More menu items. More flexibility. More accommodation. More, more, more.

That’s normal. They’re viewing your business as customers, not as the people responsible for keeping it afloat. That part is your job, and you have to take it seriously.

I’ve learned this the hard way: if you build your business around endless customer preference, you’ll quickly end up with a bloated, exhausting, low-margin mess that serves everyone except the person trying to keep it alive.

More isn’t always better—regardless of what the peanut gallery insists. Sometimes the very best thing you can do for a business is curate carefully, prune ruthlessly, and exercise a little restraint.

8. Charm matters—but it can’t carry the whole thing.

Nobody loves charm more than me. But charm by itself is not enough to carry a business.

It still has to make sense.
It still has to solve a problem.
It still has to have structure, margins, boundaries, discernment, and strategy underneath the magic.

Perhaps that’s been my biggest lesson in the past five years: A solid small-town business is part romance, part realism, and its your job as the business owner to figure out how to balance both of those things.

It’s not easy. But when you build something useful AND memorable, grounded AND charming, distinct AND sustainable, it becomes more than a business.

It becomes a place people care about. And in this strange, flattened-out modern world, that might be one of the most valuable things of all.

More Details on Our Soda Fountain Adventures:

• Unfiltered Confessions of a Small-Town Restaurant Owner (blog post)
• We Bought a 107-Year Old Restaurant… What were we thinking?! (youtube video)
• Getting Ready to Restore a 1920’s Restaurant– in over our heads?!” (youtube video)
• I’ve Owned a Restaurant for 60 Days. Here’s What I’ve Learned (podcast episode)
• Soda Fountains, Small Towns, and Life Lessons (podcast episode)
• We’re Selling the Soda Fountain. Here’s Why. (podcast episode)

The post What Running a Business in a Town of 175 Has Taught Me appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.