Schlitzhagen and Green Meatballs

By Mary J. Kunert

Book Summary
Cooking. Food. The preparation and the serving of it should be an adventure. The acquisition of a good recipe is like the finding of a gold nugget in a river.
Food brings families together, makes traditions, provides comfort, memories of good times and incidentally health.
This book was written the stories, and traditions and the fun of the search behind the recipes that are sprinkled throughout its pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483636467

Mary J. Kunert

Biography Mary Kunert is the eldest child of an Irish American poet, Hutz Deeley who with his wife, Mary, brought forth nine children in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin. Mary J. Kunert wrote poetry in her highschool days then took a long hiatus. She spent a quarter of a century in California, before returning to Wisconsin via Minnesota with her youngest son Bart and their dog Zero. After retiring, she resumed writing while compiling a book of her father’s poetry, A Regular Guy’s Song the Poems and musing of Hutz Deeley. In time she published two compilations of her poetry, Fragments and Seeking. She has two sons, the oldest and the afore mentioned Bart from her first marriage and acquired two more sons, Richard and James and two daughters Bobbie and Leslie from her second marriage. This book is dedicated to her late husband, Ernest (Dick) Kunert who said of her: “Now retired from her job as a mortgage banker, Mary is active in the Catholic Church, shoots trap, makes quilts, cooks wonderfully well and is kind to her second husband.”

Book preview

CONTENTS

Forward

Chapter 1

Chilies We Know And Love

Chapter 2

The Harvest My Frugal Ways

Chapter 3

Schlitzhagen And Green Meatballs

Chapter 4

The Wonders Of Round Steak

Chapter 5

Pasta Pasta Pasta

Chapter 6

Velveeta And Other Staples

Chapter 7

Blackberry Brandy And Other Spirits

Chapter 8

The Staff Of Life

Chapter 9

A Bowl Of Soup

Chapter 10

Herb And Friends

Chapter 11

Chicken And All That Jazz

Chapter 12

Eat Your Veggies

Chapter 13

Fruitcakes And Christmas

Chapter 14

Goodies And Just Desserts

FORWARD

T HIS COOKBOOK HAS been a long time coming and is intended to be fun. Many years ago, my husband, Ernest R. (Dick) Kunert and I self published a cookbook of family favorite recipes. We printed it from my very first computer cookbook program. Bet none of you have ever heard of Big Blue Disc. Dick named the cookbook Schlitzhagen and Green Meatballs. I keep the name, in his memory. You will find out where it came from among the recipes.

These are mostly easy and all are good comfort foods that have sprung up in my kitchen over the past 60+ years. I gathered these dishes from my mother, Mary Deeley, my ex mother-in-law, Lily Johnston and many other friends and relatives. Some evolved from my own experiences and experiments with food that was on hand. Some recipes likely came from a magazine or cookbook somewhere in my past and have been adapted into my own. If I know where it came from, I will tell.

I love to cook and don’t mind putzing around at all. Lots of people don’t. To me cooking is is a release. When I am under stress I have a tendency to get in the kitchen and bake up a storm and/or cook big fancy meals. I remember one weekend, my son Jim asked his Dad, What can we do to make Mary nervous so that she will bake something?

The recipes should be doable for all cooks. I will indicate if they are difficult, time consuming or finicky. I picked recipes that taste good and do not require a degree in science, a culinary background or beyond to prepare,

My mother and my grandparents loved to cook. We ate hearty and sometimes fancy foods. Mother loved to try new recipes and did her best to teach her ragtag band of nine children the finer things of life. This included good tasting foods, proper table settings and proper presentation. Our food looked as good as it tasted.

We ate fresh vegetables and fruits whenever possible. Dad always had a huge garden and every year Mother canned in late summer and early fall for the winter. An entire wall in the basement was lined with shelves full of a rainbow of canned produce to feed us through the winter. The modern food pyramid stresses color. We sure had lots of that, they looked like jewels in the basement light.

We ate at family picnics, church picnics, parties, holidays and birthdays. We ate at church turkey dinners and Girl Scout dinners. I remember going to those Girl Scout dinners. They were potluck usually meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. I would try other meatloaves and always thought they tasted awful. I have found that meatloaf, chili and spaghetti are very personal recipes. Hope you like mine.

We also ate gloriously every day at home.

Nine of us! My poor sainted mother. She baked bread two or three times a week. As a child I remember that we kids would get excited if she and Dad brought a loaf of boughten bread home from the store. The slices were even, for Heaven’s sake, and if you toasted it there were no burnt spots. Eventually we have all learned to value flavor over even slices. I LOVE breads and will share quite a few of those recipes.

Mother and my Dad’s mother, Helen Deeley, loved cheeses and they taught me this love. When I was seven or eight, I would walk to church on some summer weekday mornings to go to Mass with Grandma. Then we would go to her house which was just across the street from St. Mary’s and have a breakfast consisting of bread and cheese. I tried all the different cheeses available. Actually, there was one cheese that my Aunt Helen, (named after Grandma) would not let her give to me. Limburger. Later, when I lived in California, my ex-husband, Richard Johnston’s aunts, Ruth and Lib, liked Limburger. They said it was great but you had to get the first bite down. Every so often, those two ladies would get together with a hunk of Limburger and binge. I never had the nerve to try. Aunt Helen was so adamant with Grandma that she better not give that awful cheese to that little girl that I think it scared me.

I use wine and beer in cooking and also make a couple of liquors. Dick and I made wine for years but that would be another book altogether. We have passed the wine business down to our daughter, Bobbie.

We will finish up with sweets, desserts that don’t fit anywhere else. Yes, you will find a couple of desserts scattered throughout the other chapters. Enjoy the backgrounds and stories that go with the recipes. Hopefully this will be an adventure for you. Writing it is surely an adventure for me.

My wish regarding food is that no child ever go to bed hungry.

Dia Dhuit

Mary

CHAPTER 1

CHILIES WE KNOW AND LOVE

I WAS BORN IN 1940, early in World War II. Growing up the oldest of nine children in the middle of the 20th Century in small town America was truly a Norman Rockwell experience, at least for us. I remember lots of fun. I remember lots of fighting. I remember lots of love. I remember lots of good food.

World War II is a memory to me only because I recall my uncles coming home from the war. Wonderfully they all survived, so I had no mourning to mar my safe, gentle childhood. I remember going to church picnics and running out of money for the games. All we had to do was find an uncle (usually in the beer tent), stand there looking cute and money flowed out of pockets into our greedy little hands. It was great. I have given money to little nieces and nephews just to try to give them that same feeling.

Back then, prior to Vatican II, which took place from 1962 to 1965, Catholics did not eat meat or meat by products of a Friday. (That is how we sometimes spoke – Of a Friday.) After Vatican II, our Mass was said in English and we could eat meat on Fridays except during Lent. Right?

Now comes a painful truth. I did some research on this because I needed to find out the dates of Vatican II. I found out something very very interesting. In 1983, the new Code of Canon Law, specifically Canon 1251, states that Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday." In other words we still are not supposed to be eating meat on Fridays except on a solemnity (which I personally interpret as St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Friday during Lent.)

What a shock this was to me. We are still supposed to have meatless Fridays . The Code states elsewhere that Catholics may perform another act of penance such as abstaining from another particular food or doing some other act of penance IN PLACE OF THE FRIDAY abstinence. But how many of us do. We Catholics took this vague dispensation from abstinence very literally.