This week's Most Useful Discovery

Ukraine is not the land of the jumbopack. Though there are exceptions, even at our Costco-like store, Metro, many of the "bulk" items are actually several single items wrapped together. Five bags of oatmeal, four cartons of juice, seven packages of nutmeg ... you get the picture.

The first Sunday of every month, I prepare trays of tea and cookies that we carry around as people chat after church. I make the tea at home and pour it into Thermoses (from Metro, actually). Even hours after I make the tea, plus a walk to church, sometimes through the snow, the tea is scalding hot when I pour it. I love me those Thermoses.

But the cookies are another matter. At the grocery store, most of the cookies come in rather small packages — fine for a household, but pretty cumbersome when providing cookies for 40.

To get bulk cookies, you can go to the store or to the outdoor market and buy them from a cookie seller. I ask for a kilo or 500 grams of a particular cookie, and the seller whips out a thin plastic bag and dumps all the cookies in. I usually buy four kilos, which fills up all the space in the bottom of our stroller.

This is what I've been doing for years now, but I've never been very pleased with the results. First, inevitably, a lot of the cookies crumble. Second, there are lots of really pretty cookies here, topped with cream or elaborate designs, but I always decline to buy them, fearing that they wouldn't hold up to the beating they'd get in the plastic bag.

This past week, the visiting professor for the Talbot-Kyiv Extension gave a lecture on the problem of evil on Wednesday night. We had no idea how many people to expect, so I needed a lot of cookies. I went to the market, expecting to wind up with bags and bags of cookies, half of which would crumble on the way home.

But, what did I spy, but a guy. A guy with a van full of bright-yellow boxes of cookies! They were the same kind of boxes that the bulk cookie sellers get their cookies delivered in, only smaller. The cookies were nicely lined up, and the boxes protected them, even when I stacked seven boxes in the bottom of the stroller. I even bought some beautiful, pink-and-yellow-cream-topped minicakes, and even after the trip home and then to the seminary, they looked lovely and springy as they waited to be devoured. Plus these cookie boxes are wrapped in plastic, which means they'll keep overnight without getting stale, unlike cookies in a bag.

So, for now on, it's cookies in a box for me.