Last week I spent a couple of weeks on the road traversing North Dakota, looking for signs that spring would soon transition to summer. With such a mild winter with limited snow, there are not a lot of water filled potholes (Definition: Pothole- the spot on a field that is lower than the rest of the topography around it, and thus tends to gather water from melting snow and spring rains) that will slow down spring planting for area farmers.

Moisture is only one of the determining factors in the spring planting schedule, the other is soil temperature. Different crops require different soil temperatures to germinate, but farmers normally like to have a good solid week of warm weather before they take to the fields to plant their crops. In the Red River valley there were quite a number of farmers in the field; I even saw a couple of large seeders hard at work seeding crops, but for the most part it seemed like the start of spring seeding was still a few days away.

Food Truck Season Is Upon Us
I serve on quite a few boards, and when we begin to plan events one of the first concerns is the availability of local food trucks to service the events. I will take a page out of Amy Allender’s journal and talk about the first food trucks on the prairie, they were called cook cars. These cars were built to accompany threshing machines, the forerunner to today’s combines, as they travelled from field to field harvesting small grains. Now we aren’t talking trucks in the field, but horse drawn wagons. Large crews of men would be divided into teams to accomplish the task of bringing in the harvest. Out in the fields they would cut the wheat with horse drawn sickles (in earlier days they would use large hand cutters (scythes) swung by men. The cut grain would be gathered into bundles and transported to the area where a large threshing machine would separate the grain from stems. A long explanation of why these crews were made up of many men, doing different jobs to bring in a summer’s crop.

Well, you had to feed them all, and thus the cook cars serving at least a couple of meals a day to these crews. If you want to see a real cook car, and for that matter a threshing operation, look for the Makoti Threshing Show, which usually takes place the weekend after the 4th of July in Makoti, North Dakota. It’s only about 30 miles south of Minot.

Food Trucks and trailers are like cook cars. Inside is everything you need to prepare a great meal. However, cook cars were more not themed like today’s Food Trucks. Nope, just plain good old food from Hotdish Land. Seems like every time I turn around there is a new food truck working at an event. Jamaican, Mexican, Greek Orthodox, and hot dogs, just to name a few. But there never seems to be enough food trucks to go around. How can that be? Might be a pretty simple explanation. We, the food consuming public, have become adventurous in the food we consume. Rather than stop at one food truck and order our meal, we wander and do a little grazing. Maybe we’ll start with an appetizer here, go to the main entrée’ over here…no, let’s do a couple of entrées, and finally there’s dessert. It took 4 different food trucks to satisfy my hunger. If you are looking for a second income and want to meet a lot of people, let me suggest a food truck. I have been pondering a bit on a food truck that serves hotdishes. I am pretty sure it would be a big success.

Best Kept Secrets
While driving around Fargo, I happened to drive by the Hjemkomst Heritage Center. Inside is a Viking style ship that actually traversed the Atlantic Ocean, much like the Vikings did. It was built in a small town in Minnesota. There is a whole story about the Hjemkomst, but all I can say is that it is worth the time to view the ship, and the many artifacts, if you are in the Fargo area.

Today’s Chuckle
There is no greater love than that for your child before they learn how to talk back.