Help! No Refrigeration!

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Help! No Refrigeration!

Postby Mous_toy » Wed May 23, 2007 6:32 pm

My Refrigerator is broken! What can I cook in one person sized meals that won't need to be refrigerated?? I've already thrown out a bunch of stuff!
:mad:

Thanks!

Mous
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Postby hope101 » Wed May 23, 2007 8:00 pm

So you have access to a stove but no fridge? For how long?

How about baked or microwaved potato and fruit? Peanut butter and banana or PB and apple slice sandwiches? Unpeeled carrots should be fine at room temperature. Small servings of rice with a can of veggie chili or veggie soup. It would be a great time to use things like the McDougall prepackaged cups if you have them.
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pasta

Postby AnnaS » Wed May 23, 2007 8:33 pm

I would cook a one-person sized portion of pasta and make a small amount of sauce for it based on a can of tomatoes and whatever else is at hand. Can you get crackers, like the whole-grain crispbread type? Those will be fine at room temperature and you can eat them with some canned bean dip (or make some bean dip from half a can of beans; put the rest into a stew).

Dried fruit is good for snacks, or you can cook it into a 'fruit soup' for comfort food. Fresh apples will keep pretty well on the counter.

Let us know how you make out--it's an interesting challenge!
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Postby fiddler3 » Wed May 23, 2007 8:36 pm

Fruit soup? mmmm, what would that be, Anna?

Hope101, good ideas. These are the sort of ideas that would be good for travelling, another time when there is no refrigeration, and easy meals are needed.

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No refrigerator

Postby Chile » Wed May 23, 2007 8:58 pm

This guy's lived without a fridge for 30 years. I'm not up for that, but it's an interesting read. http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/03/no-refrigerator-for-30-years.html
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Fruit soup

Postby AnnaS » Thu May 24, 2007 6:48 am

My husband learned about this dish when he lived in Norway. (They have it in other Scandinavian countries also.) It is a variety of dried fruits (including lots of dried apples), stewed in water. They added sugar to this (but this now would taste too sweet to us), and something for thickener like a little instant tapioca. Eaten as a dessert, obviously, and it's most definitely a comfort food! For those long winters with no fresh produce.

About the refrigerator--I think it would be hard to learn not to cook too much food so there aren't leftovers that can't keep. We are accustomed to cooking enough for another meal or at least leftovers for lunch, and sticking this in the fridge after supper. Without the fridge you might be preparing food more often, and you'd learn to pay more attention to portion sizes, perhaps. In some climates or seasons it might be okay to store leftovers in a cool spot but you'd have to know what you're doing, I guess.
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Love the blog...

Postby Clary » Thu May 24, 2007 8:10 am

Chile wrote:This guy's lived without a fridge for 30 years. I'm not up for that, but it's an interesting read. http://littlebloginthebigwoods.blogspot.com/2007/03/no-refrigerator-for-30-years.html


I'm bookmarking "Greenpa" and his blog. Thanks for the link.

His post on refrigerators brought up memories of my 18 months of living in a small community in England, in Huntingdonshire, many years ago when I was a young wife and mother of two toddlers--in the 60's. I remember the good-natured teasing I received by our elderly landlord and landlady about how they had to go to the immense expense of outfitting the rental unit (a wooden railroad passenger car, converted to a many-windowed !! apt. during WWII for their family, and extended family, to live in, then kept as income through the years) with a "fridge" and a "washer", or none of the Americans would rent it. The refrigerator came up to about my thighs--kind of like we would use over here in a camper. No freezer. The "washer" required considerable manual assistance--of which I have, overtime, forgotten the details.

The owners had a matching railroad car for their living quarters. Very spacious in square ft., but definitely "shotgun" style! They did NOT have a washer or a refrigerator nor a TV. They, and most of their neighbors in the village, shopped daily, at the local shops--walking or bike riding, and carrying a permanent, re-useable shopping bag.

Once, I asked directions of a local shopkeeper to a cathedral I was searching for to inspect tombstones. I then asked if the directions he gave me were in walking distance. He asked, "American or English?" ;-)

I was told by an American school teacher that she thot the day would come when Americans would be born without legs :eek: , if we didn't start walking more, like the English people she had been exposed to since being in England!!

Memories.
Last edited by Clary on Fri May 25, 2007 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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natural cooling--zeer pot

Postby AnnaS » Thu May 24, 2007 11:00 am

I have to mention this wonderful invention that uses evaporation to cool things (works best in a hot, dry climate)--the zeer pot. This is being promoted in Africa and is an award-winning idea/design. See
http://www.scienceinafrica.co.za/2004/september/refrigeration.htm

Here's another short article with a picture of the inventor/developer.
http://www.slashfood.com/2006/09/28/how-cool-is-that-zeer-pot/

Can we do this here, with large flowerpots?
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Re: natural cooling--zeer pot

Postby Clary » Thu May 24, 2007 11:38 am

AnnaS wrote: http://www.slashfood.com/2006/09/28/how ... -zeer-pot/[/url]

Can we do this here, with large flowerpots?


I REALLY like this idea. :nod: I was going to ask you the same question as yours above, as I was reading at the second link, and came back to see you had included that question. I think the pots would have to be traditional unglazed clay pots, for the evaporation to take place.

What do you think?

And what about the holes in the bottom of most of our traditional clay flower pots? They could be stopped up. --and I think I saw an unglazed orange clay pot at Wal-Mart recently with no drainage hole, but it was a small pot.

I can't remember what they called it, but several of my Dad's siblings and families cooled food with moving water, somehow.

Do you have further ideas about this?? Do you plan to try it?
Last edited by Clary on Thu May 24, 2007 12:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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natural cooling

Postby AnnaS » Thu May 24, 2007 12:10 pm

Clary--I remember groundhogg told me once that in Appalachia they used to submerge things in a stream with a rope attached to keep things cool. I know that fishermen do this with their 6-packs of beer. I believe that in olden days there was sometimes something called a "spring house" which I think must have been some kind of stone structure built around a spring where you could store items to keep cold, but I've never seen one of these.

The zeer pot idea appeals to me because it's so simple. You would have to be there during the day though, to keep the sand wet. (Or rig up some kind of trickle irrigation?) Where I live the climate is usually pretty dry, so I think it might work here. I have some large pots and I am planning to try it sometime later this summer. I don't think the holes in the bottom will matter.

The natural method that appeals to me the MOST (as an avid gardener), is the old fashioned root cellar. If it's dug down deep enough these can stay around 50-55 degrees all year round, or even colder in the winter, and you can store many crops in there for months. I wish I had a root cellar! Instead, I got a small section of our unheated garage walled off and insulated, and I can use this 'cold closet' to store things like onions and squash pretty well (probably apples too). It's not quite cold enough for potatoes (mine sprouted). Also in the summer it gets up to 70 or so in there. But for much of the year, it's like energy-free fridge space!
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Double potting

Postby Chile » Thu May 24, 2007 2:33 pm

The zeer pot concept requires low humidity to work. No Impact Man found that out by trying it in NYC (high humidity): http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/click_and_the_l.html.

However, I applied the concept a couple of weekends ago with good success. We were headed out of town for the weekend and I was sure my pot of basil would burn up and dry out without water. It would be pretty hot in the house so that wasn't a viable option. I decided to put the whole pot in a larger pot filled with sand. Wetted the whole thing down thoroughly, crossed my fingers, and headed out of town Saturday morning.

We got home Sunday evening to an outside temperature of over 100 degrees. The basil not only did not die, it grew a bit! I've left it in the pot-in-a-pot arrangement and it's thriving on water every other day. This week, I got more basil. I put some in a larger pot than the first (double)potted batch and I put some in the ground. After they are fully established, I'll be keeping an eye on them to see what works best. I'm placing my bets on the self-chilling pot though. :)
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