#7. Root Cellaring...

I'm up to Chapter 16 in Jack Spigarelli's book Crisis Preparedness Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival.  The title is "Cold Storage".  In this chapter, he talks about an old fashioned root cellar or fruit room.   I don't know why I was surprised.  When I was a kid, we had a fruit room off the main part of the basement where we kept bushels of apples, big blocks of cheese and other delicious stuff.  Every year, we would motor out of the city and go to a U-Pick Orchard and bring home bushel baskets full of apples that would keep us going all winter, or we would stop in at the beekeepers and bring home big 15 lb cans of honey.  Another time, we would visit a cheese factory.    One of the highlights of the trip would be taking a tour to see how the cheese is made, and sampling some curds.  My brother and I wanted to take the tour every single time.  It smelled so wonderfully funky.

These enjoyable trips would take place over many weekends.  Mom would buy bushels baskets of pickling cucumbers and other vegetables to take to her mother's place, and she and her mom and sister would spend time making pickles and relish.  I especially remember the pungent smells of my aunt's special mustard pickle recipe.  Gosh, this book is taking me on a tour of my childhood up to the age of 12.  Those were happy days.

My dad was a great gardener too.  Our backyard was a hill with our house at the bottom, and he had it terraced all the way up.  He grew veggies, red currants, rhubarb, and all sorts of yummy things.  Under my bedroom window was a huge patch of peppermint and a rose bush, and it always smelled delicious in the summertime.  Mom made currant jam, and rhubarb everything (jam, sauce, upside down cake, crisp).

But then we ended up moving into an apartment.  Sigh!

Back to the present, I was looking at the closet in my hallway.  It goes under the stairs of the upstairs people's entry.  I wonder if the conditions in there would be right for a root "cellar"?  I'm going to have to check that out.  According to the book,  there are two types of cold storage:  1. cool and dry; 2. cold and moist.  And it requires good ventilation.  So I need a thermometer (to measure the temperature) and a hygrometer (to measure the moisture).  Research is called for.  I bet a scientific equipment outlet would have hygrometers for sale.

He also details how to prepare food for storage, and what to store them in. He recommends a couple of books on the topic: 

Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables
Keeping the Harvest: Preserving Your Fruits, Vegetables and Herbs (Down-to-Earth Book)

While looking for these books at Amazon, I noticed some other books that looked useful:

Build Your Own underground Root Cellar
The Complete Root Cellar Book: Building Plans, Uses and 100 Recipes
The Joy of Keeping a Root Cellar: Canning, Freezing, Drying, Smoking and Preserving the Harvest

In particular, this one seemed really useful:

Recipes from the Root Cellar: 270 Fresh Ways to Enjoy Winter Vegetables

It's all very well to store a bunch of veggies, but if they all rot because you don't know how to cook them, or you only know one or two ways and you're bored with them....  

I've more reading to do...  Later...