As I’ve matured in my cooking journey, I’ve developed some hard boundaries.

I don’t do fussy. I don’t do tedious. And if I can’t make it on a weeknight with minimal brainpower, it’s probably not gonna happen.

Surprisingly, these homemade chicken nuggets pass the test– I just had to modify the typical technique a little.

They’re made with simple pantry ingredients, baked instead of fried, and then breaded with a highly sophisticated culinary technique known as put-it-in-a-bag-and-shake-it.

This is exactly the sort of from-scratch cooking I’m interested in these days.

I refuse complicated for the sake of being complicated. I don’t need to recreate every convenience food under the sun. And I’m not interested in performative from-scratch cooking for the sake of showing off online.

This recipe comes straight from my new cookbook, The Old-Fashioned on Purpose Cookbook, and it’s a pretty good example of what you’ll find inside: real food, practical methods, and recipes designed to make your life easier—not give you another full-time job.

I’m excited to share this little sneak peek with you today.

What Makes These Chicken Nuggets So Special:

These from-scratch chicken nuggets are genuinely so good. They are crispy on the outside, juicy in the middle, and the pickle juice gives the chicken that extra little something without making it taste overtly pickled. They’re familiar enough for picky eaters, but miles better than the freezer-bag version from the grocery store.

Make them because they’re easy, they use normal ingredients, and they hit that rare sweet spot of kid-friendly, adult-approved, and actually worth making from scratch.

From-Scratch Chicken Nuggets

Serves 4 to 5

Ingredients

• 4 chicken breasts (about 2 pounds), cut into roughly 1-inch cubes
• 1 cup pickle juice
• ¾ cup whole milk
• 1 large egg
• 1½ cups dry breadcrumbs
• ¾ cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
• ¾ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. Combine the chicken cubes and pickle juice in a medium bowl. Cover and refrigerate to marinate the chicken in the pickle juice for 30 to 60 minutes (or overnight).
2. When you’re ready to cook, preheat the oven to 450°F. Drain the pickle juice from the chicken and discard it.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the milk and egg. Pour the mixture over the chicken and stir to coat.
4. In a large zip-top bag, combine the breadcrumbs, flour, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, salt, and pepper. Seal the bag carefully and shake to combine.
5. Remove the chicken from the milk-and-egg mixture and shake off the excess liquid. Place half of the chicken pieces in the bag. Seal the bag and shake until the pieces are evenly coated. Remove them and repeat with the remaining chicken.
6. Spread the nuggets in a single layer on a foil-lined baking sheet. A half-sheet pan (13 × 18 inches) works perfectly.
7. Bake for 15 to 25 minutes, flipping the nuggets halfway through, until the internal temperature reaches 165°F and the chicken is no longer pink in the center.

Serve immediately with the dipping sauce or condiments of your choice.

A Few Notes Before You Make Them

Do I really need the pickle juice?
It’s worth using because it adds flavor all the way through and helps tenderize the meat a bit. However, if you want to skip that step, you can.

Can I marinate the chicken overnight?
Yep. This is actually one of my favorite tricks for making supper even easier. Toss the cubed chicken into the pickle juice the night before, and one step of tomorrow’s supper is already finished.

What breadcrumbs should I use?
Plain dry breadcrumbs work best here. Homemade breadcrumbs are fantastic if you have them, but store-bought breadcrumbs work fine. We’re not proving anything to anyone with this recipe. 

How do I know when homemade chicken nuggets are done?
The most reliable method is an instant-read thermometer. Chicken is done when the center reaches 165°F.

This Is the Kind of From-Scratch Cooking I Want to Keep

The older I get, the less interested I am in making things from scratch simply so I can say that I did.

I still believe deeply in knowing how to cook, and I’m still enamored by the alchemy of turning basic ingredients into supper. But I also want those skills to serve my life instead of taking it over.

That’s the philosophy that runs through my new cookbook.

There are plenty of old-fashioned skills inside it, but I wrote the recipes for actual modern kitchens, actual weeknights, and people who have other things to do besides cook all day.

These homemade chicken nuggets are a tiny example of that. Good food. Normal ingredients. No drive-thru required—but no individually breading 47 pieces of chicken, either.

Want More Recipes Like This?

My new book, The Old-Fashioned on Purpose Cookbook, is almost here (!!).

And if you preorder before the book releases on October 6th, I have a collection of bonuses waiting for you, including:

• Cast Iron Confidence
• The Bulk Buying Blueprint
• The Good-Better-Best Grocery Guide

[PREORDER THE COOKBOOK + GET THE BONUSES]

If you’ve followed me since the first cookbook, thank you for sticking around for round two. This cookbook feels like the culmination of a lot of cooking, experimenting, changing my mind, simplifying things, and figuring out which old-fashioned skills are actually worth keeping.

And I really hope this isn’t a cookbook that stays pristine on your shelf. I hope you use it, spill on it, dog-ear the pages, and scribble notes in the margins.

That’s what it’s for. <3

Homemade Chicken Nuggets (Easy Baked Recipe)

A non-fussy and delicious chicken nugget recipe.

• Author: Jill Winger

Ingredients

• 4 chicken breasts (about 2 pounds), cut into roughly 1-inch cubes
• 1 cup pickle juice
• ¾ cup whole milk
• 1 large egg
• 1½ cups dry breadcrumbs
• ¾ cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon paprika
• ¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
• ¾ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

1. Combine the chicken cubes and pickle juice in a medium bowl. Cover and refrigerate to marinate the chicken in the pickle juice for 30 to 60 minutes (or overnight).
2. When you’re ready to cook, preheat the oven to 450°F. Drain the pickle juice from the chicken and discard it.
3. In a small bowl, whisk together the milk and egg. Pour the mixture over the chicken and stir to coat.
4. In a large zip-top bag, combine the breadcrumbs, flour, garlic powder, onion powder, paprika, salt, and pepper. Seal the bag carefully and shake to combine.
5. Remove the chicken from the milk-and-egg mixture and shake off the excess liquid. Place half of the chicken pieces in the bag. Seal the bag and shake until the pieces are evenly coated. Remove them and repeat with the remaining chicken.
6. Spread the nuggets in a single layer on a foil-lined baking sheet. A half-sheet pan (13 × 18 inches) works perfectly.
7. Bake for 15 to 25 minutes, flipping the nuggets halfway through, until the internal temperature reaches 165°F and the chicken is no longer pink in the center.

Notes

Serve immediately with the dipping sauce or condiments of your choice.

More Resources and Recipes for You:

• Redmond Real Salt remains my top choice for salt that I used in my kitchen. I buy it in 25 pound bags so I never run out.
• Make sure you check out my Salty Roast Chicken recipe for another unique and easy chicken recipe for the supper table.
• Listen to my podcast episode How I’m Cooking These Days for more details on my cooking adventures lately.
• Consider dipping them in homemade mustard or homemade ketchup or even homemade bbq sauce.

The post Homemade Chicken Nuggets (Easy Baked Recipe) appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

I used to think food preservation had to be big. Dozens of jars. Marathon canning days. Bushels upon bushels.

But there’s nothing like having the rug pulled out from under you (plus an epically horrible garden year) to give you a different perspective.

Little counts, too.

Even though my garden is beyond dead, I still have random vegetables hanging around from my Azure box and various grocery purchases.

My Mealcraft frameworks have been great for using up those odds and ends, but sometimes the assortment is a little too weird.

Or, to be brutally honest, sometimes I’m just over it and want them OUT of my fridge. (And I’m not quite ready to surrender it all to the chickens.)

Enter:

Homemade Vegetable Stock Powder

It’s basically homemade bouillon: a concentrated mixture of dehydrated vegetables, herbs, salt, and savory ingredients that you can stir into hot water or sprinkle straight into whatever you’re cooking.

It uses up a surprising amount of vegetable miscellany and takes almost zero brainpower.

YES PLEASE.

It also satisfies my squirrel-like propensity to tuck away food as soon as the calendar switches from summer into autumn.

Anyway, needless to say, it’s a win-win.

Is It Like Store-Bought Bouillon?

Kinda.

But this isn’t really about perfectly recreating those little foil-wrapped bouillon cubes. Plus, since our blend doesn’t have added MSG or a bunch of extra ingredients, it’s not going to be an identical match.

It’s more about turning food you already have into something useful.

Think of it as a savory vegetable concentrate you can use in:

• Soups
• Stews
• Beans
• Rice
• Grains
• Gravies
• Sauces
• Casseroles
• Skillet meals
• Anything that tastes like it needs a little something extra

Why the Nutritional Yeast?

You’ll see nutritional yeast in a lot of homemade vegetable bouillon recipes. It adds that extra punch of umami and helps the vegetable broth taste a little fuller, but you don’t have to use it. 

I’ve had a jar sitting in my pantry for years from that time I was experimenting with homemade cashew cheese (ah, the good ol’ days….), so I used it in this round of bouillon powder.

If you don’t have any nutritional yeast or don’t want to buy it, just skip it and lean harder on other savory ingredients like:

• Mushrooms
• Tomatoes
• Tomato powder
• Onion
• Celery
• Garlic (raw garlic will add a bit of a bite to the finished powder– but I like it.)

The Vegetable Stock Powder Framework

This is not a rigid recipe on purpose, because it doesn’t have to be—especially when its whole purpose is to use up what we have. 

Aka: You’ve got a lot of wiggle room here, my friend.

(Btw, if you like this sort of flexible cooking, you’ll love my Meal Craft Method.)

Here’s the walkthrough with all the deets, and the printable version is below.

THE BASIC HOMEMADE BOUILLON FORMULA

4 parts dried vegetables

1 part savory/umami ingredients

½ part herbs + aromatics

Salt to taste

That’s it.

STEP 1: Choose Your Veg

Use any combination of:

• Onion
• Leek
• Celery
• Celery leaves
• Carrots
• Bell peppers
• Zucchini
• Parsnips
• Garlic

I like a mix that’s heavy on onion and celery because they give it that classic stock flavor. And it’s ok if the veggies are past their prime. For my latest batch I used wilted celery and a thawed/squishy bell pepper that my stupid fridge froze.

Go Easy On:

• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Kale
• Beets
• Strong leafy greens

They’ll work, but their flavors can be overpowering.

STEP 2: Add Something Savory

For every 4 parts dried vegetables, add about 1 part savory ingredient.

Choose one or mix several:

• Dried mushrooms
• Dried tomatoes
• Tomato powder (Here’s my full blog post with all the deets on tomato powder.)
• Nutritional yeast
• Extra dried onion
• Garlic

Mushrooms and tomatoes are especially good here because they add the deeper flavor we associate with broth. I used mushroom powder and tomato powder I had made previously. 

STEP 3: Add Herbs

Add roughly ½ part herbs and aromatics.

Fresh or home-dehydrated herbs can be measured as part of that ½-part ratio. If you’re using dried, already-ground herbs from your spice cabinet, use less because they’re much more concentrated by volume. (Aka, please don’t dump in a 1/2 cup of ground rosemary.)

I rarely have enough fresh thyme or oregano around to dehydrate separately, so I usually just add a smaller amount of the dried herbs I already have.

Good options:

• Parsley
• Thyme
• Oregano
• Celery leaf
• Garlic
• Rosemary (use sparingly—it can be overpowering)
• Sage (same as the rosemary)

How to Make Vegetable Stock Powder

1. PREP

Wash your vegetables and slice them kinda thin and sorta evenly. This is an excellent destination for ugly carrots, celery leaves, vegetable ends, tired peppers, and other odds and ends. Don’t worry about making them beautiful.

I ran my carrots through the shredding blade of my food processor because I was in a hurry that day and rough chopped the other veggies.

2. DEHYDRATE

Spread the vegetables in a single layer on dehydrator trays. Dehydrate at approximately 125°F to 135°F until they are completely dry. And I mean completely. Shoot for brittle and crisp—not leathery.

Your drying time will vary depending on the vegetable, thickness, humidity, and dehydrator.

3. COOL

Allow the vegetables to cool completely before proceeding. This prevents condensation from clumping up your finished powder.

4. MEASURE

Once everything is fully dried, measure your ingredients according to the framework:

4 parts vegetables (I used a mix of carrots, bell pepper, onions, and garlic this time around.) 
1 part savory ingredients (This time I used 1/2 cup nutritional yeast, 1/2 cup mushroom powder, and 1/4 cup tomato powder.)
½ part herbs/aromatics (This time I used a 1/4 cup TOTAL of already dried/ground rosemary, thyme, oregano, black pepper.)

5. GRIND

Place everything in a:

• High-powered blender (the best option, IMO.)
• Food processor (this won’t produce as fine a grind as a good blender so be careful)
• Coffee grinder
• Spice grinder

Grind until you have a fine powder. If necessary, sift out larger pieces and grind them again.

6. TASTE

Mix about a teaspoon of the powder into a 1/4 cup hot water and taste.

Then add salt, herbs, or savory ingredients until it tastes like something you’d happily use as broth. I added 2-3 teaspoons of fine sea salt to this batch. Don’t skip the salt- it makes a HUGE difference. 

How to Use Vegetable Bouillon Powder

Start with approximately:

2 tablespoons vegetable stock powder per 1 cup hot water, then taste and adjust.

Or don’t even make actual broth and sprinkle the bouillon directly into whatever you’re cooking. (This is how I use mine the most.) A spoonful in a pot of beans. A little in rice as it cooks. A shake into gravy. A sprinkle in a soup that tastes flat. You get the idea.

An Note About Storage

This entire method depends on the vegetables being fully dehydrated before you grind them.

If there is still moisture in the vegetables, that moisture is now trapped inside a jar of finely ground food—which is exactly what we don’t want.

So, when in doubt, dry them longer. I’d also rather make several small batches throughout the year than one enormous batch destined to sit in the pantry forever.

Which, I suppose, brings me back to my larger lesson here:

Preservation doesn’t always need to be an enormous production.

Six carrots matter. Half an onion matters. One beet matters.

Saving a handful of vegetables from the trash and turning them into something you’ll use all winter is enough.

Little counts, too.

Love this Post? Check out these:

• How to Make Dehydrated Vegetable Powders
• Check out Meal Craft for more Flexible Frameworks
• How to Put Your Dehydrator to Work Around the Homestead
• How to Make Herbal Vinegar

The post Homemade Vegetable Bouillon Powder Recipe appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

I have a beet.

A single, solitary beet.

I didn’t grow this beet. (Garden apocalypse this year, remember?)

I got it in a produce box from Azure Standard. Because that’s what you do when your ground is poisoned and barren.

(Okay, okay. I’ll stop being so dramatic about it.)

Anyway.

There was a time when August meant vegetables on every flat surface of my house.

Tomatoes spilling out of bowls. Monster zucchini. Peppers and green beans and onions. Cucumbers multiplying when I wasn’t looking.

A hot kitchen, sticky counters, and entire afternoons spent managing the harvest.

But not this year.

This year, it’s just me and my beet.

And said beet has plunged me into all sorts of ruminations.

For a period of my life, my homestead grew like an out-of-control August garden.

Abundant. Expanding. Always more, more, more.

But as I’ve stripped things down—both in my life and in my garden—I’m realizing there’s something very useful about having less, even if just for a season.

When there’s less noise and excess, you get a much clearer look at what you actually like. What you actually want. And what matters enough to keep.

And what I’ve realized after the biggest shake-up of my life is that I am still the woman who cultivates and grows and preserves—regardless of who is or isn’t in my life.

It is woven into the fabric of who I am. (More thoughts on this soon…)

And I’ve also made peace with another notion:

Little things still count.

Somewhere along the way, food preservation became synonymous with volume.

Boxes of peaches. Bushels of tomatoes. Five-gallon buckets of cucumbers. Hundreds of filled jars over the course of a season.

Friend, trust me— I have done that version. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I loved it. (Well, most of the time…) And I’ll probably do it again.

But I think all that abundance perhaps accidentally convinced me that preserving food was only worth it when I had monster quantities.

But the little amounts count just as much. Maybe even more.

Not everything needs to be an epic project in order to have value.

A handful of onions can become pickled onions. Two cucumbers can become refrigerator pickles. Four tomatoes can become salsa for dinner. A fistful of herbs can become herb salt. And one beet can become one very tiny jar of pickled beets.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay.

So here’s what I did with my one beet

Quick pickling has been one of my favorite kitchen tricks for years for exactly this reason: it scales up or down beautifully.

I’ve shared my master formula before, and there’s a version in my upcoming cookbook as well, so I won’t turn this into another dissertation on pickling.

But here’s the basic formula I’ve used for years:

My Basic Quick-Pickle Brine

• 1 cup vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar, optional

That amount is enough for roughly two pint jars, so I scaled it down a little for my lone beet.

The sugar isn’t required, but it softens the bite of the vinegar.

How to do it:

I cooked Mr. Beet until tender, peeled and sliced him, then tucked the slices into a clean pint jar.

I mixed together the brine ingredients in a small saucepan and brought them to a boil so the salt and sugar dissolved. Then I poured the brine over the beet, let it cool, and put the jar in the refrigerator.

I let it sit for about 48 hours before eating so the flavors have a chance to settle in.

That’s it.

You can also do this with cucumbers, carrots, green beans, radishes, or garlic. If you want all the variations, vinegar options, flavor combinations, and troubleshooting, I have a full quick-pickling guide here.

My preservation philosophy for this season:

Preserve what you have—big or small. Don’t wait until there’s enough to make it feel impressive.

Use the handful. Fill the tiny jar. Make the salsa for one dinner.

The point isn’t how much we can put away. The point is knowing how to take whatever is in front of us and make something useful from it.

I’ve spent a lot of years believing the biggest things were the most worthwhile. But this season is teaching me to pay more attention to the small stuff.

The one beet.
The one jar.
The humble rooms in my house.
My handful of chickens.
The three garden beds instead of twenty.
The twenty acres instead of sixty.
The things that don’t look like much, but still matter— deeply.

Perhaps abundance isn’t always measured in quantity. Sometimes it’s simply recognizing the value in what’s already there.

—Jill

P.S. If you like flexible formulas and frameworks like this one, you’d probably like Meal Craft too. It’s built around learning simple kitchen patterns you can adapt to whatever you have on hand—so dinner doesn’t require the perfect recipe or the perfect ingredients.

The post I’m Pickling One Beet appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

What are we sacrificing in our race towards progress?

It is a horribly helpless feeling to own land and realize you may not be able to grow food on it.

As I’ve been sorting through my recent garden woes, my brain, doing what brains do, has jumped to the worst-case scenario several times:

What if I can never grow a garden here?

I usually spiral over that for a while before my rational side takes over and reminds me that I’m still at the beginning. That I always, always figure things out. That I’ll figure this out too.

But still.

There is something so unsettling about realizing that owning land doesn’t necessarily mean you can feed yourself from it.

And I believe we’re only at the beginning of this problem.

For a very long time, we’ve romanticized the idea that you could buy five or ten or twenty acres, learn a few skills, plant a garden, raise some chickens, and therefore possess a meaningful degree of food independence.

Or perhaps it wasn’t even a point of romance. It was simply the way things were.

The challenge used to be:

Learn how to work with nature.

Now it is shifting to:

Figure out how to overcome what humans have done to it.

Contaminated manure. Herbicide carryover. Depleted soils. Chemical drift. Water problems. Unfettered development. Poisoned resources. And whatever comes next…

Once again, I’m over here in my little prairie office asking the same question I’ve ruminated on repeatedly in my books and writings:

At what cost?

The circle of life.
The water cycle.
The carbon cycle.
Seed to plant to seed again.

Plants grow. Animals eat the plants. Waste and decay return nutrients to the soil. The soil feeds the next generation of plants.

Round and round it goes.

But our progress-at-all-costs obsession seems determined to turn these circles into straight lines.

We extract.

We consume.

Then we extract some more.

Someday, the bill will come due.

Yet anyone who questions when that bill is coming is painted as anti-technology, anti-growth, or nostalgic for a past that never really existed.

We’re told, in no uncertain terms:

This is progress.

This is what it takes to feed the world.

This is just how things are.

In essence?

Get over it.

Dare to question the resources these sorts of projects consume and someone will inevitably say, “Well then, stop using Amazon. Stop using Facebook. Stop using the cloud.”

As if shutting down my laptop would somehow slow the freight train of development barreling toward us.

But okay, sure. I’ll admit my hypocrisy.

I am typing this on a computer connected to Wi-Fi. My businesses exist on the internet. My livelihood depends on technologies and systems I sometimes criticize.

I am not standing outside the machine pointing my finger at everyone inside it. I am inside it too.

But surely participation does not require permanent silence.

Surely we are still allowed to look around and say:

This is hurting us.

At what point does the price of progress become too high?

At what point do we admit that we cannot extract and consume forever on a finite piece of ground?

At what point do we stop dismissing the people asking questions as crackpots, alarmists, Luddites, or obstacles standing in the way of progress?

The consequences of our current choices may not fully arrive in my lifetime, or even my children’s, but that doesn’t make asking hard questions foolish.

And someday, we may wish we had started asking them much sooner.

To be clear, I am not arguing that we abandon technology, modern agriculture, electricity, computers, or every convenience industrialization has given us.

I don’t have all the answers or some easy peasy 1-2-3 solution.

But I am increasingly suspicious of the assumption that forward is always better simply because it is forward, especially when there is so much money to be made from convincing us it is.

Progress is not inherently good. It is a trade.

Sometimes a worthy trade, but a trade nonetheless.

And perhaps we should spend less time asking whether we can build the next thing, scale the next thing, extract the next thing, or make the next thing more convenient— and spend a little more time asking what are we giving up in exchange.

Our soil?

Our water?

Our ability to grow food?

Our landscapes?

Our independence?

Because a machine that requires us to sacrifice the things that sustain us is not progress. And at some point, we have to stop calling it that.

-Jill

P.S. A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this very topic. You can find it here.

The post When the Ground Can No Longer Feed Us appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.