flea at laff #2: milk truck.

snack: mediterranean grilled cheese sandwich
drink: mexican coca-cola

one of the best things about flea markets is that you can go to them & wander around for hours just looking at stuff, knowing full well that you aren't buying a damn thing. you can show up, bullshit with some old dude about the importance of gargoyles for a half hour, really show interest in a particular latvian one he has & even make up some story about how your dead uncle was latvian. then, out of nowhere you can flip the switch on him, give him the ol' "well i'm going to think about it. good day, sir" & slowly back away from his gargoyle booth. in a nutshell, i'm one of those folks who wanders around flea markets looking at stuff & never buying any of it.

this saturday, i fought off the urge to sleep the entire day away & headed down to the brooklyn flea to do some wandering around & sample another food vendor. i arrived shortly after noon & since the sun was still out, the flea was quite hopping. i did a few laps around the market, checking out the day's random stuff. i recognized some repeat vendors from the previous weekend--the map booth, the "letters from a marquee" area, the bicycle hats table. if you were in the market for an iron maiden t-shirt this weekend, there were a couple on display at the flea. if you were looking to take your love of metal one step further & get your very own flying V guitar, there were not one but TWO to choose from at another booth.

i didn't really give the food vendors a full look last weekend, so in this weekend's wanderings, i finally gave them the full once over. there are TONS of them. we're talking people selling bread, raw chocolates, beer making supplies, pickles, cupcakes & pretty much everything else under the sun. for the life of me, i couldn't find the folks from sigmund pretzel shop, which is unfortunate, because with today being national pretzel day, i really wanted to give them some love. they're on the flea's list of vendors, but i've yet to see them there. maybe they were hiding behind a throng of hip brooklyn flea-goers. oh well.

the lines at the fish taco, pizza & lobster roll stands were too long, so i went with the shortest line at that moment, the one at the stand for milk truck, makers of artisanal grilled cheese sandwiches. here's the thing about milk truck: at the moment, there isn't an actual milk truck to speak of. according to grub street, keith klein, the man behind milk truck, plans to expand beyond the stand & have an actual vintage divco milk truck on the streets by this summer. i'm all for an artisanal grilled cheese truck, especially since it looks like they have one sandwich "made with bittersweet chocolate and orange marmalade on sourdough pullman bread." how did i not see that one on saturday? i'm pretty sure that if i'd seen it, i would've been powerless to resist.

instead, since the saturday sunshine made me yearn for topless beaches & rocky coastlines, i opted for the mediterranean grilled cheese, made up of local fresh mozzarella, caramelized pequillo peppers, tapenade & aioli on a sandwich roll. sounds fancy, right? the price--$6.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich--seems a bit high at first, but i suppose it's realistic for nyc, especially considering that it's all artisanal & shizz. the sandwich itself is snack sized, round & about as large as your average pancake. i'm a big fan of fresh mozzarella & when i bit into the sandwich, the cheese held nicely & stretched between my mouth & the bread. with the gooeyness of the mozzarella, the butteriness of the bread, the sweet flavor of the peppers, the bitterness of the olives in the tapenade & the aioli, i totally felt like i was in naples or algiers or something. i've never been to either though, so i can't actually confirm that the feeling's authentic.

what really helped set the mediterranean mood for me was when on the way toward the steps at the back of the flea, where everyone sits & eats, i saw a woman with a baby & i was looking at the baby thinking "oh, what a cute bebe." next thing i knew, the woman popped out her boob for the bebe...looks like i wasn't the only one getting on the milk truck, if you know what i mean. it all happened so fast that in the span of five seconds, my brain went from "cute bebe" to "cute booby" to "look away look away look away." that's sort of like a topless riviera beach, i suppose.

i was also feeling a bit "south of the border" this weekend, so i broke my caffeine ban & got mexican coca-cola in a glass bottle to go with my fancy grilled cheese sandwich. it's essentially the same formula as american coca-cola, but instead of using sweet sweet HFCS, it's made with sugar. maybe they do so because their corn lobby doesn't have much sway with vicente fox, the former president of coca-cola mexico & former president of the country. maybe they do so because mexico needs their corn to make tortillas, not soda. either way, without the HFCS, it tastes less syrupy & better overall than the coca-cola we get here in the states. sure mexico has rampant corruption, a struggling economy & drug cartels murdering people in broad daylight, but at least they don't have HFCS in their coca-cola. if you ask me, that's pretty sweet.