Polish take-out yesterday afternoon from DJ’s European Market and Deli: lunch and partial dinner for Barbara, partial dinner for me. DJ’s is in the Polish Triangle, right on the Dorchester-Southie border. Courtesy of prompt delivery by GrubHub, we ordered stuffed cabbage (Barbara describes it as “almost as good as Grandma Lagowski’s), shredded beets, pierogi (perfect — note the bacon in the picture), and one gigantic pączki (yum). (Actually, the singular of “pączki” is “pączek,” but nobody seems to know that unless you’re Polish. It’s hard to type that ogonek under the “a”; one of these days I’ll have to learn Polish.) Dinner was completed by adding kielbasa and salad.

This is much more Barbara’s style of cooking than mine, even though my maternal grandmother was almost Polish.

You may wonder what “almost Polish” means. Well, my grandmother was born in a shtetl that started out being in Poland, but it was in Russia while she was growing up, and now it’s in Belarus! It’s not that the shtetl moved — it’s just that the national borders in that part of the world tend to move around.

Categories: Dorchester/Boston, Food & Restaurants