Enjoying Eastern European cuisine

The members of St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church in Glen Mills hold a Food Festival twice each year, and this year we got to sample their Eastern European specialties, made by church members. We browsed the online menu, ordered perogies, cevapcici and halushki, and picked up our food at the church on Nov. 14. Behind the church some folks were eating at picnic tables, enjoying the warm, sunny afternoon, but we took our goodies home for supper. We enjoyed the camaraderie among the church members: the man who brought our order to the car called out a friendly greeting to "Uncle Mitch," an elderly fellow heading toward the kitchen, and taught us how to pronounce the names of the dishes we had ordered. "I don't know if that's right," he said, "but that's the way I learned it." The perogies were pasta dumplings filled with potatoes and covered with onions (far left in the photo); the cevapici were hearty ground-beef sausages (far right in the photo); and the halushki was a mixture of cabbage and noodles (third from the left in the photo). All were delicious -- I wish we had ordered more! You can learn more about the church, which is on Route 352, at its website www.sthermansoca.org/.