Treasure at the flea market

When I was a kid, we shopped at a grocery store that positioned the entrance so you had to wheel your cart past a giant bakery case full of tempting things like donuts oozing chocolate goo, clown-shaped cookies the size of your head coated in red sugar, and pastry horns filled with the most divine cream.

I've given up on grocery-store baked goods, because these days they taste like the plastic buckets that contain the mysterious hydrogenated slime they're made of.

But yesterday at the flea market, I bought this slab of dough for 50 tetri from a lady selling them out of a giant cardboard box. Dusted in powdered sugar and wrapped around a smear of custard, it tasted like a real pastry, made by a human being out of ingredients actually found in nature.

Once I realized how amazing it was, I tried to chase down the woman who sold it to me, perhaps to buy the entire box, but sadly she had been absorbed into the crowd.

I did manage to pick up a few other treasures, too: old Soviet pins, a set of crystal wine glasses. But I wish I could find that lady again.