More Cheese More Chocolate

It’s not often that I receive mail from my grandparents, and when I do, it’s always something good – birthday cards, photos of their immaculately decorated Minneapolis apartment in the 1940s, and most recently, 30-year-old clippings from an Iowa newspaper column where my mom and grandma once shared family recipes (you might have seen this photo on Instagram). I wanted to share the clippings immediately, but I figured I should hold off until I could actually make one of the recipes, which I finally did last week.

At the time that my mom’s feature was published, my dad was a second year resident and a meat eater, and my mom was a stay-at-home mother of two boys (her favorite child wouldn’t be born for another year and a half).  After long days of eating nothing but hospital cafeteria food, my dad would come home to a hearty dish like German Caraway Meatballs or Veal Supreme (which sounds totally ’80s and I have zero recollection of it, but according to the article, it made regular appearances at their dinner table).  Thirty years later, my mom still makes German Caraway Meatballs for my dad after long days at the hospital, but it’s been about twenty years since he’s eaten meat, so now it’s more like creamy mushroom and caraway sauce over spaetzle with the meatballs on the side for any non-vegetarians present.

German Caraway Meatballs has been a family favorite for decades, and even though I grew up with a strong aversion to mushrooms, I still loved this meal. My mom will be happy to know that when I made this last week I ate all of my mushrooms instead of picking them out one by one to hand over to Matt – progress!

German Caraway Meatballs

• Meatballs (see below)
• 1 10.5-oz can of condensed beef broth
• 8 oz. fresh mushrooms, sliced (button or crimini)
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• Spaetzle (see below)

For the meatballs:

• 1 lb. ground beef
• 1/4 cup bread crumbs
• 1 tsp salt
• dash of ground pepper
• 1/4 tsp poultry seasoning
• 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 egg
• Oil for cooking

For the spaetzle:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup breadcrumbs
• 2 tbsp melted butter

Lightly mix the meatball ingredients and shape them into 1-1/2 inch meatballs.  Heat 1-2 tbsp oil in a large skillet over medium to medium-high heat, add the meatballs, and cook until browned.

Add the mushrooms, onion, and broth to the browned meatballs.  Cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Combine the sour cream, flour, and caraway seeds.  Stir the mixture into the broth.  Cook over low heat, stirring occasionally until the mixture thickens. While the mixture thickens, cook the spaetzle.

Sift together the flour and salt.  Add the eggs and milk; beat well.  Pinch into rapidly boiling water.  Cook, stirring, for five minutes, or until the spaetzle floats. Drain. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs mixed with butter.

Serve the meatballs and sauce over the spaetzle. Sprinkle with additional chopped parsley, if desired.

This might be sacrilegious, but I, um, didn’t use my mom’s meatball recipe.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it; it’s just that since I made the meatballs from Smitten Kitchen, it’s hard to go back to any other meatballs. While the recipe that I used is actually for meatball subs (which are incredible!), I’ve found that the meatballs themselves are perfect for a multitude of dishes. I made a few tweaks to the recipe – dried instead of fresh breadcrumbs, moistening the breadcrumbs with milk instead of water, halving all of the amounts, and using all beef – and I don’t know that you can go wrong with it.

The original recipe called for canned mushrooms instead of fresh. I barely do mushrooms in the first place, so there was no way that slimy, canned ones were coming anywhere near my kitchen. When I texted my mom to confirm that she doesn’t use canned mushrooms, her response was “did I ever?” so I guess fresh mushrooms have been the norm for quite a while.

The soup bases from Penzeys are my go-to when making anything requiring broth, so instead of using a can of condensed beef broth, I just made a concentrated 10.5-ounces of beef soup base. To make the vegetarian version, cook the meatballs separately and swap out beef broth for vegetable broth.  Steamed or roasted cauliflower would probably be a good stand-in for the meatballs, too.

The most important thing with the spaetzle is finding the right tool for transferring it to the boiling water, be it an actual spaetzle maker or something else you have in your kitchen.  My mom always used a big, plastic colander with holes that were probably 1/4-inch wide.  I have a small colander with tiny holes and a large colander with long slits, neither of which were ideal. I opted to use the strainer part of my salad spinner, which, as it turns out, wasn’t ideal either.  I had a few skinny strands and many giant chunks, but after breaking up the giant pieces with a spoon to ensure that they were fully cooked, I had perfectly edible spaetzle that we could drown in meatballs and sauce.  Next time I might try using the strainer part of my fat separator or possibly my flat cheese grater, but I could see that taking a disastrous turn.

Also, I stopped reading the recipe after the boiling step, so I missed out on the part about sprinkling them with buttery breadcrumbs. We didn’t miss them.

This was the first home-cooked meal that Matt ate at my parents’ house, it often makes appearances when my brothers and I are home around the holidays, and now I get to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!