A quick update on how its been without the old fridge.
Its been over a week now and you know what? It's been just fine!
Temp has got to withing a degree or two either side of 19oC over the last few days and that's been fine too.
The only casualty from the change over was a punnet of strawberries but.....well, what idiot buys strawberries out of season anyway!! And to be fair they where on the turn the day I brought them so its hard to appoint blame.
Anyway. The corner of the hall where the fridge food lives stayed between 15-19oC all week, and the wooden cupboard below it managed to keep an extra 4-5 oC cooler.
What we are planning to do now is to build a cupboard/pantry in that corner and rout out holes in the floor (covering said holes with fine mesh to stop "visitors") and draw up the cold air from under the house, as below the floor in the hall is an @2foot crawl space where the water pipes live and it is very chilly down there.
That's the theory anyway.
If anything I would say I am happily surprised at how well our fridge food has done this week.
The temp rising and the snow melting meant no safety net for us and of course the tiny fear that we might all go down with food poisoning and have to eat our words :P
In actual fact some food has kept better. Salad and fruit (like grapes and blueberries) have kept longer and more edible out of the fridge. They no longer start to brown and get that delightful slime that salad especially can get after a few days in the fridge.
Really is you think about it, the normal temp of a fridge (5oC) is aimed at keeping meat and milk from spoiling, putting it in suspended animation until you wish to consume it. But would you expect a cucumber to thrive outside at that temp?
For the omnivorous among you a workable solution could be to have a mini fridge for your meat and dairy and a cool pantry for the rest?
Its fascinating working it all out, learning to trust your senses (open, sniff, decide freshness, ask husband to taste it ...etc ;).
Dare I say it?
Is the fridge the metaphor for all that is wrong with the human race?
Are we now so unsure of our own abilities to tell if something is fresh that we have to run a "safe cold electrical wardrobe" 24 hrs a day so we DON'T have to think about it??
Maaaybe that's a little broad sweeping, but when you buy a bottle of pickle or tomato sauce and it now says "once open keep refrigerated" and you think "Holy Moly! When did I have to start doing that!! I've been leaving it in a cupboard for YEARS! I even leave it in full sun for 10 hrs at a time in BBQ season...Hmm better put that in the fridge then..you can't be tooooo careful!!"
Do we really need to be afraid of our food?
Well said Kelly!
ReplyDeleteWe have a saying in our house concerning food that is out-of-date or has been stored contrary to the manufacturers instructions:
"If in doubt, use your snout!"
We've eaten food from supermarket bins and never experienced a single incidence of sickeness.
We are living in such a 'spoon fed' culture that it is sometimes liberating to break-out and take a few risks....
Totally Sandie. An interesting side note is that my kids seem much more eager to eat fruit and salad now! Its just more palatable when it isn't cold and slimy lol..I brought a water melon and wondered if I would end up throwing it out because usually it gets a slice taken off and thn put in the fridge and no one wants it..this time it was gone in 3 days!
ReplyDeleteUsually, a bit of common sense can tell if food is gone off. Sandie is right. Just do the smelling test before tasting. I like her saying. `If in doubt, use your snout!' I shall adopt that into our household, too. I think that your idea about removing floorboars and letting air circulate into a cool cupboard could be a great way to store foods. It`s no different to what our ancestors would have done. Sounds a great idea. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteHi Kelly,
ReplyDeleteI sometimes visit and read here - found you through Touchwood. I am about to embark on a pretty large renovation endeavor, and want it to be a green model for the city and its residents. Now that you're a month+ in, can you tell me a bit more about how your fridge-less food experiment is going?
My hope is that if you can make a cool pantry work in your cottage, I can make a north-facing stone wall in a basement work!
Ker , you should absolutely be in a better position than we are with a stone north facing basement wall!! In fact I am now seriously jealous!!
ReplyDeleteA book you might want to try is "Root Cellaring" by Mike and Nancy Bubel. This book explains some of the principles to keeping food cool in a root cellar/basement.
I'll be updating with a new fridgless post soon!