Brooklyn Flea

The Hunt is back with some fun vintage finds: a still life painting in purples and greens and a kid-sized cash register in which to store your heard-earned nickels and dimes.

When you find the items above, which can be hidden in any vendor booth, it’s yours, absolutely free! Then we post your photo with the generous vendor here on the blog on Tuesday. You can only win once per calendar month. Items posted every Friday at noon.

From left (click to enlarge):

Saturday, July 30 (Fort Greene): Framed oil painting on wood. Vintage

Sunday, July 31 (Williamsburg): Toy cash register and piggy bank. Vintage

Note: The Flea happens outdoors every Saturday in Fort Greene and every Sunday in Williamsburg. The markets are open every weekend, 10am–5pm, rain or shine. For maps/directions, click here.

The Greenmarket farmers at Smorgasburg bring incredible local products to the table each week, and we created the Greenmarket Special to highlight both the farmers and Smorgasburg vendors' creative use of summer's bounty. This week we're happy to bring you Electric Blue Baking Company's blueberry blintzes, which are not only seasonal and delicious but totally and completely vegan!

Anita Shepherd of Electric Blue Baking Company has consulted for a number of well-known restaurants, working her creative vegan recipes onto menus across the city. At Smorgasburg, she brings a different array of treats each week: she always stocks one savory, one sweet and one beverage—all vegan.

The Special's blueberry blintzes are made with blueberries from Red Jacket Orchards. ("I got to pick up from their warehouse in Bushwick," Anita reports, "and got a tour of the cold room where berries are stored! So fun.") Anita describes the glamorous blintz-making process: "Half of the berries were cooked down with organic sugar, and after, the other half were tossed in raw. So you get both sweet and tart. The crepes are organic and made with ingredients like Blue Point toasted lager & pureed kubocha squash. The blintzes are served sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and come topped with a dollop of whipped coconut cream."

Red Jacket Orchards' gorgeous berries have been featured before in the Greenmarket Special—and why not, since they're at the peak of their season (but fading fast! Summer sets quick in the world of berries and cherries). Red Jacket's family-run operation, in the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY, produces all sorts of super-sweet fruits, not to mention their famous line of ciders and juices. We recommend you stock up on those quarts of berries before they're gone for the year!

What else is in season right now? Here's a list of goods that our Greenmarket farmers will have on tap tomorrow:
Sungold tomatoes
M'smen Moroccan flatbread
Duck prosciutto
Ragin' rhubarb chutney
Sour cherries
Lemon cucumbers
Seasonal focaccia
Fresh duck breast
Garlic jelly
Blueberry stomp

New antiques, art magazines, cutting boards and summer rolls for sale. That's a weekend!

Saturday (Fort Greene):

1craftybee - One-of-a-kind industrial antiques from a Long Island seller.

Carrier Pigeon - A quarterly magazine (screenshot above) of illustrated fiction and fine art that gives full creative control to the artists, illustrators, designers and writers.

Lone Star Empire - We reintroduced you to smoked-meat slingers Lone Star Empire last week, but this Saturday they'll be serving heat-friendly Vietnamese salad rolls, rice paper stuffed with vegetables and meat.

Sunday (Williamsburg):

Black Dot Furniture - Brooklyn-based Black Dot Furniture's “Bento Boards”—walnut, beach, maple, birch, mahogany and teak cutting boards—use about 50% reclaimed materials and are finished with non-toxic oil and wax finishes.

A real mix of new eats this week including Spanish tortillas, Japanese mochi and American-classic baking mixes—cool kitchenware too. Plus we've got a lowdown of what's in season at the Greenmarket right now.

Ansel Blue Design Studio - These Etsy sellers will be coming down from Western Massachusetts to sell their collection of illustrated recipe cards, aprons and napkins, and other fun kitchen-related goodies.

Spoon NYC - The popular Chelsea cafe branches out with breakfast basics and baking mixes. Look for brownie and pancake mixes, easy to make and delicious to eat.

Sweet Fusion - Small-batch ice cream (in flavors like toasted coconut lemongrass, coffee and candied bacon and cherry-passionfruit sorbet) tucked into homemade mochi balls (pictured above), made by a former Mesa Grill pastry chef. There will also be deep-fried ice cream and fresh mango/sweet coconut mochi.

Tortilla - Tortillas—baked-egg frittata-esque savory pies—are a staple of Spanish cuisine. Spaniard Gemma Castellanos will bring some of her authentic tortillas to Smorgasburg for the first time. (We recommend pairing a slice with a cup of La Buena gazpacho.)

What's in Season - Since we'd like to keep you up to date of what's great at the Greenmarket, this week the Greenmarket vendors will have the following in stock (and more!):
Sungold tomatoes
M'smen Moroccan flatbread
Duck prosciutto
Ragin' rhubarb chutney
Sour cherries
Lemon cucumbers
Seasonal focaccia
Fresh duck breast
Garlic jelly
Blueberry stomp

See what happens when you Flea? We're so proud when Flea vendors launch new, exciting ventures or have great news to share. Here are a few vendor updates we're excited to tell you about:

Jewelry seller George Yzquiero of Estate Jewels is opening a showroom at 111 Lafayette Ave. at the corner of South Oxford (that's Flea OG Elma Blint's old space). George reports that "it will function as a place for stylists to pull looks—we can style brides and celebs there, and it will function as a shop for our clients and professional shoppers who are never free to see us at the Flea on weekends."

Neanna of Bogart & Moore Vintage announced that she's opened up her own Brooklyn showroom (located at 56 Bogart), shared with local clothing, shoe and jewelry designers. In further Flea interconnectedness, Neanna outfitted her space with vintage racks and fixtures that she purchased from Chris at Totally Bruce, and at her grand opening party this Saturday July 30, from 7pm–midnight, there will be food from I8NY and "prosecco flowing aplenty," Neanna says. (That's her shot of a vintage Victor Costa dress, above.)

Blue Marble Ice Cream is happy to declare that their delicious, all-natural ice creams are now certified organic and kosher. And in even bigger news, their newly redesigned pints are now in Whole Foods and will soon be available nationwide. Huge!

Sam Kim of kimchi line Skim Kim is hosting a special event called Something I Ate. Billed as a "collaborative food + art event series aimed to create a platform for creatives to converge using food and drink as a vehicle for connectivity," it's all happening tonight.

And in the world of Flea vendor book publishing, the Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book: 52 Seasonal Recipes for Small Batches, by Erica Shea and Stephen Valand, will be out this fall on Clarkson Potter.

The skyline of NYC is dotted with those wooden water towers perched on rooftops. If you ever wondered what happens to the towers once they're dismantled, look no further than The Vintage Industrial's gorgeous, handcrafted tables, benches and mirrors. The whole line is made from reclaimed wood (sustainable!), much of it rescued from a water-tower company's warehouse lumber yard, where spent redwood goes to retire. Other raw material comes from sources like old Seagrams distillery barrels or ripped up parts of the Coney Island Boardwalk; every piece of wood has its own narrative—a deep history in grain and knots.

What the guys of Vintage Industrial—Adam, Luke and new addition Eddy—do to those planks of worn and weathered wood is a sight to behold: giant slabs get transformed into dining room tables fit for kings, or coffee tables that look as good in a $20 million condo as in a rusted-out loft space. Adam, the metalworker, and Luke, the wood craftsman, met after they'd both been scammed by the same crooked contractor, banding together to start their own project. Adam welds over at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, while Luke and Eddy sweat it out in a basement workshop in Bed-Stuy. (Luke and Eddy are also in a very cool band called People Get Ready—they recently spent time as artists-in-residence at the Watermill Center.)

"Reclaimed wood is a pain in the ass," says Luke, explaining that the reason their work looks so good is because there are natural flaws in the wood, adding character and depth to each piece. "But when trying to make a cut and it cracks or there's a nail in it," Luke says, "it gives it character, but it's difficult."

"Using reclaimed wood doesn't mean we get the wood for free," Luke clarifies. Vintage Industrial's prices might be dear (coffee tables run about $350, large dining tables hover under $1000), but between the price of old wood and the hours of labor (each piece takes from two to four weeks to complete), the value is high. "I'm sorry that I made this with my hands and I bought the wood and I totally made it," Luke says, hitting notes of both sarcasm and honest truth.

It's well worth a visit to the Vintage Industrial at the Flea in Williamsburg on Sundays, if only to free yourself from the tyranny of disposable Ikea furniture. The Vintage Industrial's pieces are timeless and classic and each one tells a fascinating story.

Sometimes the Scavenger Hunt is an elusive scoundrel. Last Sunday's prize, Kika NY's lovely triple-band leather bracelet, was indeed found—but there is no photo to prove it! (Technical difficulties, one assumes.) Kika recalls that the winner was a local guy who wasn't really hunting officially, but "he bought a wallet and was very happy. And then, hey, he found it! He put it on, seemed to be very surprised. Then he left." Pictures or it didn't happen.

Dutch expat Caroline (Kika) Vliegenthart is a filmmaker and leatherwork artist who's been selling her modified canvas bags (above) and exquisitely handmade leather sandals, jewelry, suspenders, belts and wallets at the Flea since April. Kika's line uses high quality leather from Europe and imported brass fixings, and the vintage canvas bags from France date back to the 1940s. Very gentlemanly and stylish stuff.

We love it when you take great photos at the Flea and Smorgasburg, but we especially love it when you document the step-by-step devouring of an entire pig's head, as prepared by the insane dudes at the Meat Hook. On Saturday at Smorgasburg, photographer Rachel Says Hi and her three friends sat down for a pork party the likes of which we've never seen. These girls were not messing around—see a few of her photos below.

Many thanks to porktastic photog Rachel Says Hi, Flickr pool contributors Carley Clement and Shawn Hoke Photography, and Twitter/instagram users _sarahcoffey and thecheekychef.

We're back with another Greenmarket Special, our weekly Smorg special dish where a Smorgasburg vendor goes to town with a Greenmarket farmer's fresh-picked ingredients.

The Skytown/Weeekend Girls team started at Smorgasburg selling their sweet and savory hamentaschen-style pastries. Proprietors Ian and Sabra have now expanded the operation to include a radically good kale salad, just-foraged borage-flower iced tea and other seasonal, farm-fresh treats. "Skytown started with one intent: to build the most excellent cafe in the world," says Ian. "Our food is simple-ly graceful. And balanced. Like wabi-sabi. And it is always thoughtfully crafted, start to finish."

That kale salad (with ground cherries!) is the Greenmarket Special this week. Ian explains: "We choose the finest fronds from the beautiful assortment of kales at Brooklyn Grange. Then we take it to the kitchen and tear it to pieces. After dousing it with lemon juice, apple cider vinegar and raw honey, we massage it lovingly. Then we throw snacks on it (nuts, raisins, sliced apples and whatnot) and sell it to people."

Brooklyn Grange is an organic farm that's actually in Queens (Long Island City, to be exact). They cultivate an extraordinary range of vegetables and herbs on a rooftop one-acre plot. The Brooklyn Grange crew is dedicated to community outreach and education, and work to "promote city farmers by providing them with a living wage and reliable livelihood."

Eric from the Flea/Smorg (aka me) is part of a cool talk next Monday, July 25, at the Phaidon bookstore on Soho, which is free, includes cocktails, and will be nice for smart, fun people like you. We hope you can come.

The panel is about urban farming and gardening, with a focus on making growing your own food easier and more accessible. (The hook is a beautiful new Phaidon book called "Vegetables From an Italian Garden.") We like the title for the event—"Taking Root"—but more important we hope this will inspire a larger conversation about the bigger ideas connected to Smorgasburg and food at the Flea: the small/local/fresh food movement; food access, obesity, and nutritional health; and even the widespread hunger lurking just around the corner in all our neighborhoods.

We're proud to be joined by filmmaker and environmental advocate Ian Cheney, co-producer of "King Corn" and founder of Truck Farm, a 1/1000th acre farm-on-wheels, and Michael Grady Robertson, owner of Grady’s Farm, a 62-acre farm in the Hudson Valley whose first Greenmarket stand is at the Smorg. (He was also named NYC's "hottest farmer" by the NY Post in 2009.) And awesome Diner Journal is playing host and moderating, so it's all legit.

It's free, but an RSVP is required: email "Vegetables" to store.soho@phaidon.com. Here are the details.

Taking Root: Growing Your Own Produce in Urban Environments
Monday, July 25, 2011
Phaidon Store, 83 Wooster Street (btw. Spring + Broome), Soho
6:30pm doors; 7:00pm start; cocktails to follow
FREE