P I C N I C

The rebuilding center is awesome!

It would have been very nice to have a trailer for a food cart, after all, so many food carts are trailers. But once I opened the frame up it had a lot of rotten wood that I wanted to replace. I’d already built the floor, as you can see, and it took a lot of patience to built it within the shell. I didn’t realize, somehow, until now, that because the shell is stapled to the wood framing, there would be no way to remove the frame and rebuild a new one. It’s too delicate an operation and the aluminum shell is so fragile. The problems with the shell went on and on. Leaks in the roof, white paint that probably had lead in it, windows that needed to be moved, a ceiling that was a few inches too low. So I decided to dispense with the aluminum shell, the trailer proper. It’s sad, but it must go.

These are some bagels I made this morning. The toppings are poppy seed, sesame seed, salt and pepper. They’re plump and round, just like a commercial bagel, except instead of using fresh yeast and a hot proof box I placed them in the fridge overnight and used a sourdough starter. The crust and crumb are like a french bread. Authentic bagels, Elly tells me, are hard, dense, and chewy. There’s a food cart at the PSU farmers market, Tastebud, that makes excellent bagels in this style with a wood fired oven. They make breakfast sandwiches out of them, with cucumbers or lettuce. But, I don’t see why a bagel can’t be soft and open on the inside and crispy on the outside. All the better for accepting butter, peanut butter, cream cheese, capers, tomatoes with all their juices, etc… But these preparations and uses of a bagel would most definitely be called vulgar by a bagel historian.

I found this on craigslist in Milwaukie. It’s a little beat up but I think it will make a nice food cart.