Real Food Kitchen Tour: The Prairie Homestead

Welcome to another edition of the Real Food Kitchen Tour. This week we’re featuring Jill Winger, author of The Prairie Homestead.

What’s a Real Foodie?

A “real foodie” is someone who cooks “traditional” food. We cook stuff from scratch using real ingredients, like raw milk, grass-fed beef, eggs from chickens that run around outdoors, whole grains, sourdough and yogurt starters, mineral-rich sea salt, and natural sweeteners like honey and real maple syrup.

We don’t use modern foods that are either fake, super-refined, or denatured. This includes modern vegetable oils like Crisco and margarine, soy milk, meat from factory farms, pasteurized milk from cows eating corn and soybeans, refined white flour, factory-made sweeteners like HFCS or even refined white sugar, or commercial yeast.

We believe in eating wholesome, nutrient-dense foods that come from nature. So we shop at farmer’s markets or buy direct from the farmer, or we grow food in our own backyards.

Jill with her Brown Swiss

This Week’s Real Food Kitchen Tour: The Prairie Homestead

This week we travel to Wyoming to visit Jill Winger’s homestead kitchen. She has a beautiful cow and an absolutely adorable daughter. Her blog is full of really helpful posts, from how to naturally clean your chicken coop to a recipe for soaked buttermilk biscuits.

Go check out her post on how to survive a blizzard — you have to see the photo of the view from her front door.

Name: Jill Winger
Blog: The Prairie Homestead
Location: Southeast Wyoming
Size of Kitchen: 14 x 14 (maybe?)
Things You Love About Your Kitchen: My island is probably my most favorite part of our kitchen. When we purchased our 100 year old farm house, it had very little counter space and NO dishwasher. My handy hubby crafted the island from scratch and made room for a lovely new dishwasher (as well as putting in a tile backsplash, and rewiring/replumbing the whole thing!). We also moved the sink to the island, providing me with much more counter space. Even though it’s small, I love that my kitchen has lots of character and is cozy on those wintery days.
Things You Would Change: Somedays I wish that the kitchen was a little more open to the rest of the rooms in the house. Typical of older houses, the rooms are small and boxy. If I had my wish, the kitchen would flow into the dining room and living rooms. But, I still love it nonetheless.
Favorite Tools & Gadgets: I couldn’t live without my big stainless steel stockpots! I use them constantly, especially for dealing with all the milk that comes from our milk cow. I’m always working on a big batch of yogurt or cheese. I also adore my slow cooker (for cooking beans, homemade broth, soups, and chili) and my food processor (homemade butter, peanut butter, slicing and chopping)
Biggest Challenges Cooking Real Food: Remembering to plan ahead. Our weekly “schedule” (I use that term loosely…) moves fast and changes often. Unfortunately, you can’t whip up a batch of sourdough tortillas or pinto beans 30 minutes before it needs to be on the table. I’m still working on incorporting more menu planning into our lifestyle and learning to make some items ahead and store them in the freezer. Some weeks it works, some weeks it doesn’t. 😉
Current Family Favorite Meal: We had a bountiful summer of food grown on our homestead. Currently, our favorite meals are simple ones made with food from our property: grassfed beef steaks served with potatoes and veggies from our garden, or breakfast for dinner: antelope sausage (we love to hunt and always have a supply of game in the freezer), homegrown potatoes fried in coconut oil, and scrambled eggs from our chickens.
Favorite Cookbooks: Nourishing Traditions, Joy of Cooking, and a variety of real food blogs.

Kitchen motto

LOVE this!

View of the island and main work area

Main workspace

Oldie but goodie

The first dishwasher this old farmhouse has ever seen

Another island shot

I love the color scheme!

Keep my most used resources readily available

My lovely antique butter mold is on the left.

How cool!

Spice drawer.

I used small half pint mason jars with colorful scrapbook paper labels to organize my herbs and spices. In my opinion, there is nothing sadder than a meal without flavor! I’m in my spice drawer multiple times a day.

Handy in the pantry

Part of my pantry. My slow cooker, Nutrimill, and my small buckets of hard white and hard red wheat (we store the big buckets elsewhere)

The little gardener

Our 18 month old daughter already has an intimate relationship with her food. She loves picking fresh veggies from our garden, collecting eggs, and “helping” take care of our dairy goats, cattle, and horses. She already knows where her food comes from!

The beginning of our garden this year

Hello

Oakley, our raw milk supplier. This photo was taken in early summer before she calved. She is a Brown Swiss.

Beautiful!

Check Out the Previous Real Food Kitchen Tour Posts

Let Us Tour Your Kitchen

Are you a real foodie? Do you have a kitchen that you’d like to see featured on CHEESESLAVE?

Please email me at annmarie AT realfoodmedia dot com. Either send me a link to a Flickr set or email me your photos (minimum of 5, but more is better). Note: Please send me LARGE photos. Minimum 610 width. If they’re too small, I can’t use them.

Oh, and please send the answers to the above questions (at the very top of this post).

As much as I’d love to include all the photos I receive, I can’t guarantee that I will use your photos in the series. I’m looking for creative, good quality photos.

Some ideas for photos:

Show us what’s in your fridge or what’s fermenting on your counter
Take some snaps of some of your favorite kitchen gadgets, or show us how you organize your spices
Got backyard chickens? Send some pics!
How about a lovely herb garden?
Kids or pets are always cute!
Try to include at least one photo of yourself, ideally in your kitchen

And no, you don’t have to have a blog to be included in the tour.