snack: beef brisket hot dog
drink: lemonade
when it comes to sleeping in, i rule. i'm pretty much a world champion at it, especially when my brain whips together yarns that'd make luis bunuel giddy. why wake up when i'm getting a free, private screening of a never-before-seen bunuel film? this past saturday, i was in the middle of a prime sleeping session, making my way through a series of surprisingly hot & steamy dreams. before i knew it it was 1pm, the sun had been shining upon brooklyn for hours already & i hadn't made it further than kicking the covers off...yeah, adulthood. to remedy this, i got the hell out of bed, quickly made myself presentable & headed out the door for the flea. i figured it was the least i could do to get my day started.
after my last trip to the flea, i was excited to try out one of this season's new vendors. i gave some serious consideration to peanut butter jellified but decided to save them for another week & go with brooklyn bangers, a business that's an offshoot of the prospect heights restaurant the vanderbilt, whose menu includes a number of local, sustainable, hand-crafted sausage-type products. brooklyn bangers just concentrates on these sausage-type products, with a menu of kielbasa, bratwurst, merguez & "jim's slims." at the flea, they also serve the vanderbilt's "pinkie's gooey butter cake," a dessert which sounds heart-cloggingly delicious.
when i was reading the menu & saw the words "beef brisket" & "hot dog" next to each other, i was rather confused so i asked the dude working the booth what the deal was. did they have beef brisket? did they have hot dogs? what gives, man? as it turns out, it's actually a beef brisket hot dog. it's made in-house with beef brisket (two-thirds brisket & one-third pork fatback to be exact). when i heard that, my eyes lit up & with my trademark awkward thumbs up, i told the dude "let's go with that."
it's about a six-inch long hot dog that comes in a potato roll & on top of the dog there's some sort of sweet mustard/relish concoction. as i've refined my hot dog palette, i've learned that many judge a hot dog by the snap when you bite into it. this one didn't have much of a snap but it was still quite tasty, so i don't know how much i care about the snap. basically, it was like your average, everyday hot dog but the meat was of much better quality & hoof-free. i thought it tasted a bit sweeter, but the accompanying mustard/relish concoction (with its visible mustard seeds) & the potato roll (the yummiest type of roll known to man) could've had something to do with that sweetness.
for my beverage, i went with the lemonade. it was either that or an iced tea & i drink enough iced tea as it is. why not go with the lemonade? it was a warm spring day & if i learned anything from years of country time lemonade commercials, lemonade is the perfect beverage for a warm spring day. drinking it also leads to an exciting motorcycle ride with grandpa. you get to ride in the sidecar! sometimes, said lemonade also leads to lemon face. this lemonade was quite tart & totally gave me lemon face. still, it was pretty tasty. unfortunately, it also came with a bunch of enormous ice cubes, which definitely cut into the amount of actual lemonade i got. i suppose i did end up with a secret bonus second beverage of cold water once all the cubes finally melted.
overall, it was a solid snack-drink combo & at only $7 ($4 for the dog and $3 for the lemonade), it fits nicely into the budget of the cheap flea-goer. it also makes me want to make my way over to the vanderbilt to check out the full restaurant menu...maybe one of these days. until then, i'm cool with a brooklyn bangers beef brisket hot dog at the flea.