flea at laff #3: salvatore bklyn.

snack: open faced sandwich (ricotta, arugala, prosciutto, sea salt)
drink: san pellegrino aranciata

it's been a few weeks since i last made it out to the brooklyn flea, so this past saturday, i decided to get out of the apartment, get some fresh air & check out the flea scene. by the time i got up & got my lazy ass out the door, it was early afternoon & a beautiful seventy degree day out & i had a bunch of new albums on the ipod, so i was ready to rock. this week, i wasn't all that intrigued by the merchandise at the flea, but i did spend a few minutes at this one booth filled with books. there wasn't really anything worth reading though, but there were an abnormally high number of copies of twilight & the kite runner sprinkled throughout the books.

i'd only had a bowl of cereal earlier in the day, so after a few times weaving up & down the aisles, i was ready for a snack & stopped at the table for salvatore bklyn, who were set up close to the front of the market. salvatore was founded a few years back by two ladies from brooklyn (betsy & rachel) & first made a name for itself with ricotta cheese. their basic story is rachel went to italy, met this dude named salvatore who made bomb-ass ricotta cheese & she and betsy became great friends with him. upon returning to the states, they created a similar cheese & named it after him. then people tried it & were all like "day-yam." now you can get their cheese at all the hip cheese establishments & according to their website, "if cheese were a rock star, it'd be salvatore bklyn." hell, they don't even need vwls. tht's ttly rck str.

what attracted me to their table was their spread of open faced sandwiches. they took slices of bread, spread on a layer of their famous ricotta, put on some arugala, sliced some prosciutto right off of a pig leg they had hanging out on a spear next to the table & sprinkled on some sea salt. for good measure, they drizzled a bunch of olive oil on top of it & wished you a good day. i'm a sodium-monger & a sucker for high-priced meats, so i dig prosciutto. it's pretty much my favorite meat. as for ricotta, it's repulsed me for most of my life, but after being pleasantly surprised by a guac topped with ricotta at the 2010 guactacular & realizing that it's what they put in cannolis, i've been giving it another chance recently.

the "sandwich" was about the size of three fingers, one for each dollar i paid. my goal was to get four bites out of it, each containing as much of each ingredient as possible. other than tearing off a huge piece of prosciutto on the first bite, my plan worked for the most part. what i ended up with in each bite was the flavors of cured, salty pork, slightly-sweet cheese, slightly-peppery leafy stuff & bread & although it was gone in sixty seconds, it was a worthwhile sixty seconds. SO many different flavors & textures. if i wasn't cheap, i definitely would've got another.

since i had an italian theme going with the sandwich, i also got a san pellegrino aranciata, a sparkling orange beverage that's imported from milan by nestle. san pellegrino's officially the oldest company ever featured on eat!drink!snack!, as they've been producing water since around the end of the friggin FOURTEENTH CENTURY. that's like way back. to put things in context, when they started, it was about a hundred years after the crusades ended & a hundred before columbus started sailing oceans blue. as for the aranciata, they've been making it since 1932. to put things in context, that year a plucky dictator named mussolini published his doctrine on fascism. i bet ACTUAL mafia gangster types drink this stuff all the time back in the old country.

the aranciata is pretty simple--water with orange juice, sugar, carbon dioxide & citric acid mixed in. it's 18% OJ & basically tastes like a fresca without the chemically aspartame aftertaste. i still had about half a can remaining when i left the flea & as i walked around the neighborhood in the seventy degree weather, i found it to be quite refreshing. quite indeed. i drink OJ on the regs, so i'm planning on buying a bottle of seltzer & making my own version of this stuff at home. if i'm drinking OJ anyways, i might as well. after all, everything's better with bubbles.