Letting the season get a vote…

Last week I wrote about my hot little house.

I’ve been leaning into the rhythm of opening windows at dusk, pulling the blinds before the sun heats my dining room, and embracing the way a lack of central air is making me pay attention to the seasons in ways I haven’t in years.

It’s absolutely changed the way I cook, too.

Because when it’s 95 degrees outside and I’m covered in sweat just sitting at my dining room table, the idea of turning on the oven, even for ten minutes, is nauseating.

At first blush, that might sound like a hardship. But the more I lean into it, the more I’m realizing it’s not all bad… at least not in the Old-Fashioned on Purpose sort of way.

One thing I’ve noticed about modern life is how hard we work to make every season feel exactly the same. I’ve certainly been guilty of it.

We want to cook the same meals in July that we make in January.

We want our houses the exact same temperature year-round.

We buy strawberries in December and tomatoes in February.

And somewhere along the way, we started expecting ourselves to stay the same through every season, too.

Before industrialization, the seasons were non-negotiable because life demanded it.

Today, of course, we have the luxury of ignoring them. And while I’m grateful for many of those conveniences, I also think we lose something when we never let natural rhythms influence us at all.

So this summer, I’ve been letting the weather call the shots a little more than usual.

Here’s what’s been on our menu lately:

• BLTs and whatever sandwich ingredients we have lying around.
• Chicken breasts wrapped in tortillas with cheese, lettuce, dressing, and whatever vegetables are hanging out in the crisper drawer.
• Big salads loaded with bacon, hard-boiled eggs, grilled chicken, avocado, tomatoes, and ranch (homemade or store-bought… I don’t even care right now…)
• Tacos. So many tacos.
• Cooking as much as I can in the Instant Pot since it doesn’t heat up the kitchen.
• One pan skillet meals with random meat and pasta and maybe tomato sauce or cheese or whatever I can find in the fridge.
• Stovetop mac and cheese with leftover meat stirred in for protein.
• Watermelon for supper. Period.
• Snack-board dinners with cheese, fruit, sliced meat, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, home-canned hummus, crackers, and random vegetables when it’s just too hot to care.

As I was writing this list, I realized it’s basically my MealCraft system in action.

I created it because I got tired of staring into the fridge wondering, “What on earth are we eating tonight?” Especially when it’s hot, I’m overwhelmed, or I don’t feel like making another grocery store run.

Many of us learned how to follow recipes, but very few of us were ever taught how to make dinner from what we already have.

How to look at a fridge full of somewhat random ingredients and think, “What could these become?”

One of the biggest shifts I’ve made in my own kitchen is realizing that supper doesn’t have to start with a recipe.

It starts with paying attention. (Which, once again, appears to be the theme of my current life.)

Paying attention to what’s in season. What’s already thawed. What’s in the fridge. How hot it is outside. How much energy I actually have tonight.

Then I let real life have a vote. And somehow… Dinner still gets made.

So if your house is hot like mine, your garden is overflowing (or, in my case… dead—but that’s a story for another day), and the thought of turning on the oven makes you want to die….

Let your life shape your cooking—not the other way around.

The older I get, the more I realize that’s true of almost everything.

Some seasons call for pot roast…. others call for watermelon.

The trick isn’t making every season look the same.

It’s learning to cook—and live—with the one you’re in.

—Jill

P.S. If you’ve been stuck in a “what’s for dinner?” rut, my newly revamped MealCraft Method is 15% off right now with the code PODCAST. My hope is that it helps you think differently about supper—not just this summer, but all year long.

The post What We Eat When It’s Too Hot to Cook appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

It’s hot here.

Not Florida hot. Not Arizona hot.

Wyoming hot…. Which I know isn’t as bad as some places and I shouldn’t be whining.

BUT. Considering I wore a coat for a good portion of our horsemanship clinic just two weeks ago, these high-90s days feel like… a lot.

And it’s especially noticeable because, for the first time in over ten years, I don’t have central air.

That’s not particularly unusual in Wyoming, but when you’ve gotten used to it for over a decade, living without it feels different… in ways I didn’t really expect.

Here’s what this hot little house has been teaching me:

Because yes, I’m sweaty. A lot. (I had sweat dripping in my eyeballs when I was painting my closet last week…) But I’m also much more aware.

• I now notice the difference between an 82-degree day and a 92-degree day.
• I know exactly when it’s time to throw the windows open in the evening, and exactly when to shut them and pull the blinds in the morning to capture as much of the cool air as possible.
• I know exactly when the wind shifts or a storm rolls through because I’m sprinting around the house slamming windows before the neighbor’s topsoil infiltrates my home.
• I’ve been line drying laundry more (because the dryer has an internal vent and HOLY MOLY, it’s like a furnace)… but it makes me happy every time I look out and see clothes on the line. I haven’t done that in nearly 16 years. It’s another little step in coming back to myself.
• I’m spending far more evenings sitting on the porch than I ever did at the old house, which means I’m watching the thunderheads build, hearing the nighthawks, and relishing in the feel of soft evening air on my skin. (In the past, I would’ve been wrapped in a blanket because the air conditioning kept the house so cold. And that always felt backwards to me.)
• I’ve worn shorts enough that my legs are actually getting mildly tan, which maybe has never happened before??
• And when a thunderstorm finally rolls through or we get one of those rare cool days? It is glorious. I FEEL every bit of it. In my body. On my skin.

And it’s got me to thinking….

I’ve had a few conversations lately about what “Old-Fashioned on Purpose” actually means.

People are quick to try to turn it into rules and lists, which makes my hackles stand up. I’ve even had people tell me recently that my divorce somehow isn’t “old-fashioned on purpose.” (I could write a whole post on that… maybe I will later.)

Regardless, that completely misses the point.

Being old-fashioned on purpose—or homesteading, or slow living, or whatever the heck you want to call this sort of life I’ve been teaching and living for 16 years—has never been about following an imaginary set of lifestyle rules or pretending life always fits into neat little boxes.

It’s about paying attention.

Paying attention doesn’t automatically make us better people, but it does make us more human in a world that’s doing everything it can to numb us. And that’s no small thing.

So would I accept central air if someone offered to install it for free tomorrow? Probably.

I have no interest in being a martyr or earning some sort of simplicity merit badge.

But this season of sweating and opening and closing windows has got me thinking…

How sometimes convenience doesn’t just insulate us from discomfort, Sometimes it insulates us from awareness, too.

These little rhythms—whether we choose them or whether life hands them to us—pull us back into our bodies.

They help us notice the wind. The seasons. The relief of a cool evening. The smell after a thunderstorm. The satisfaction of hanging clothes on the line or opening the windows at just the right moment.

In participating in those things, we wake up in the best of ways.

And to me, that’s what Old-Fashioned on Purpose has always been about.

It’s never been about wholly rejecting modern life or being self-righteous or demanding that the old ways are ALWAYS better.

It’s just about choosing (or sometimes simply accepting) the kinds of ordinary rhythms that make us more awake to the life we’re already living.

When I compare my awareness this summer to last summer—when I hardly knew what temperature it was outside because every room stayed exactly the same—I realize this hot little house of mine isn’t all bad.

It’s made me pay attention again.

Which just so happens to be a theme of my life right now.

And I think that’s a pretty good thing.

-Jill

The post Lessons from My Hot Little House appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

Turning Panic Into Motion…

I just finished a ten-day horsemanship clinic.

It was exactly what I needed.

Horses have a way of bringing me back to the present moment. Considering we were also roping, there’s very little room for distraction when you are connecting your thousand-pound animal to another live animal with a rope… And your fingers are somewhere in the mix.

It’s fairly dangerous, but that also makes it exciting and forces me to be fully in my body instead of lost in my head.

So even though I ended the clinic tired and sunburned and rope burned, it was a very good week.

Then I came home.

Funnily enough, all the things I left unfinished did NOT magically fix themselves while I was out living my best cowgirl life.

Weird.

The garden plants are still dying from some mysterious herbicide situation.

The half-done bathroom remodel is still staring at me every time I walk past it.

The fence still does not exist.

The financial accounts still need to be addressed and organized.

The dust from the next-door field continues to enter my house through closed windows and coat everything in a fine layer of silt.

As I surveyed the situation, my brain did what it loves to do when life gets loud: it took five separate problems, threw them into a blender, and handed me one giant smoothie of panic.

Nothing was actually on fire, but it sure felt like it was.

This is the part where another content creator might would tell you they lit a candle, journaled peacefully, and surrendered to the process.

But I didn’t.

I freaked out for a minute… Cried a little… Walked in circles for a bit…

And then remembered I actually do know how to handle this.

Whenever my life starts feeling like a junk drawer, I have learned the most merciful thing I can do is to stop trying to hold it all in my head.

I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suspect our brains were not meant to be storage units. At least mine isn’t.

They are not meant to hold the garden troubleshooting, the bathroom timeline, the fence supply list, the financial questions, the dinner plan, the kid schedule, and the vague dread of “what if this all falls apart?” at the same time.

Yet we carry it all around like a tangled ball of yarn, then wonder why we feel exhausted before we’ve even begun.

For me, the antidote is ALWAYS mapping.

It’s not about fixing everything or becoming a higher-capacity woman or even more coffee.

Just mapping.

For me, that looks like writing down everything swirling in my brain and then attaching the next smallest action to each thing, like this:

The garden plants are struggling big time. I know there is some sort of herbicide damage involved (more thoughts on this soon…) So my action is: test the soil and call the Wyoming Department of Agriculture for ideas.

The half-done bathroom remodel feels overwhelming and halted and gross. So my next action is: paint the vanity (and watch a bunch of videos on how to change out a light fixture).

The fence is still just a vague, looming idea. So my next action is: meet with a friend, walk the space, and make a supplies list.

The money and accounts feel scattered. So my next action is: have the call with my financial advisor.

The dust in the house is making me crazzzzy. So my next action is: order a crapload of weather stripping.

None of those actions magically fixes the whole problem. But the weirdest thing is that even before anything is technically fixed, writing it out makes me feel better.

Because once it’s written down, the problem is defined. It’s no longer just a foggy, looming mass taking up space in my brain. It has edges. It has shape. It has somewhere for me to start.

I’ve learned that overwhelm thrives most in vagueness.

It feeds on the big, sweeping, dramatic stories our brains love to tell: Everything is too much. I’m behind. I don’t know where to begin. I’ll never get caught up.

No wonder we freeze.

But the moment I can turn the swirl into a sentence, and the sentence into one small action, something shifts.

The problem may not be solved, but it is no longer shapeless. And for me, that makes a huge difference.

This is why I always include brain dump sections in my planners. They give the chaos a place to land.

When I can take the swirling ideas out of my brain and put them on a page, they lose their stranglehold on me.

I love the old adage, “action cures fear.” But action cures a lot of other things too. It cures fog and paralysis and that dreadful feeling that everything on your plate is too big, too tangled, too late, too much.

And simple action is enough.

It may not always be Instagram-worthy, but it is how life gets built. And rebuilt.

One phone call, one errand, one coat of paint at a time.

So if your life feels like a junk drawer right now, maybe don’t try to solve the whole thing today. (Speaking to the choir here…)

Just name the thing.

Write down the next smallest action.

And do that.

I’ll be doing it right alongside you.

-Jill

The post When Everything Feels Out of Control, I Do This appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.

I’m writing this in between moments at a horsemanship clinic, with dust on my boots, sun-burned lips, and approximately fourteen other things I’m supposed to be doing.

And that feels oddly appropriate, because this thing I made was never meant to be a glossy, perfect-life sort of project.

It was built in the middle of real life… Around full days and late dinners. Around kids and animals and business and weather and the never-ending question of what in the world we’re going to eat tonight.

But somehow, right in the middle of all that, there’s still room for the ordinary magic: flour on the counter, onions sizzling in butter, a pot of soup on a dark winter night, and the quiet satisfaction of making something with your own two hands.

So today, I finally get to officially share it with you:

My new cookbook, The Old-Fashioned on Purpose Cookbook, is coming Fall 2026.

This book is very much a sister to The Prairie Homestead Cookbook, but it also feels like a reflection of where I am now.

Still from-scratch. Still practical. Still deeply rooted in home and the land… But a little more seasoned now— in every sense of the word.

Inside, you’ll find the recipes and kitchen rhythms I return to again and again: simple meals for real life, flexible frameworks, everyday bread and sourdough, from-scratch staples, preserving guides, and the sort of food that reminds us the kitchen doesn’t have to be fussy to be meaningful.

There are no gold stars for doing it perfectly.

There are no rules that say you must churn your own butter while wearing linen and smiling serenely at a spotless counter. (Hallelujah for that!)

This book is for the days when you have beautiful garden vegetables spilling across the counter… and also for the days when you’re staring into the freezer at 5:12 p.m. hoping inspiration appears.

It’s for the old-fashioned cooks, the aspiring old-fashioned cooks, the tired cooks, the curious cooks, and the ones who just need a little nudge back toward the kitchen.

More than anything, I hope this book feels like an invitation: Back to your hands, back to your instincts, and back to the steady, grounding work of feeding yourself and your people with what you have, where you are.

I’ll be sharing more peeks behind the scenes soon—the cover, photos, recipes, and all the little details that went into bringing this project to life.

But for today, I just wanted you to hear it from me first:

The Old-Fashioned on Purpose Cookbook is officially on its way.

And I’m so glad I finally get to tell you.

-Jill

P.S. The book will hit shelves in October, but Barnes & Noble is running a preorder sale this week. Now through Friday, June 26, B&N Rewards members can get 25% off with the code PREORDER25. So if you already know you want a copy, this is a lovely time to grab it.

The post I Made You Something (and it’s finally feeling real….) appeared first on The Prairie Homestead.