Photo by Mike Lamb Joan Gawarecki, center, with the Divine Health Center Auxiliary visits with the Schubert family from Brookings, South Dakota, during the Ivanhoe Polska Kielbasa Days on Saturday. Vanessa, left, and Darius, at right, are both originally from Poland. Their daughter, Julia, sits in the center.

IVANHOE — Vanessa Schubert knows how to make some delicious Golabki (stuffed cabbage rolls).

“When I cook them, I like to make them in the oven. I like to put in vegetables and bacon. They taste incredible. It’s a way different flavor versus cooking on the stove,” Schubert said while sitting inside the Ivanhoe VFW Hall Saturday.

She joined her husband, Darius, and daughter, Julia, to take the 37-mile journey from Brookings, South Dakota, to attend the ethnic tasting event put on annually during the Polska Kielbasa Days in Ivanhoe.

The Schuberts immigrated to the U.S. more than 25 years ago

“We used to live in New Jersey where there is a huge Polish community,” Darius said. Now, his family lives in Brookings and he believes they are the only Polish family within 100 miles. While finding Golabki slightly different, the Schuberts said they enjoyed the ethnic foods event in Ivanhoe that also featured Polish sausage and sauerkraut, pierogi, ponczki, czarnina and kluski. The Divine Providence Health Center Auxiliary has held the luncheon during the Ivanhoe Polish Days for 47 years. Joan Gawarecki, age 78, has been involved with all 47 years. She’s a charter member.

Her favorite Polish food is the ponczki. While many of the foods are ordered from a company in the Twin Cities area, the auxiliary members still make the ponczki from scratch. Gawarecki said traditional ponczkis are made with fruit fillings such as plums or prunes. However the auxiliary also offers ponczkis with chocolate.

“You can blame that one on me,” Gawarecki said with a laugh. “In my family, my grandmother was 100 percent German and my grandpa was 100 percent Polish. Being German, of course, she (grandma) liked chocolate. She made them with chocolate. The first time I was asked to bring ponczkis, I brought chocolate of course because that’s all I knew.”

Gawarecki said one of the other auxiliary members wasn’t too happy with her variation of the pastry.

“‘Those are ponczkis, they have fruit filling in them,'” the member told her, Gawarecki said. “But I have a Polish cookbook at home. You can put any filling in them. They are a pastry. I think if you look in your Polish background, they always had plums and prunes. That is something they had to do (what was available to them).”

While Gawarecki talked about the ponczkis, Elaine Stynski was cooking the pierogis.

“They first need to be broiled, then they need to be fried. Some of them have cottage cheese in them. Some of them have sauerkraut and some of them have potato. You fry them up and they look like this,” Stynski said while pointing the pan of pierogis.

“You put them out here (serving table) and away they go.”