By Andrea McGovern
SHEFFIELD-Carol and Marty Yonkof live in the country home they built 28 years ago on a big lot in Sheffield. On a fall day, you can hear the Brookside High School marching band practicing a mile or so down the road. For Marty Yonkof, riding his tractor mower is a great stress reducer, and he’s got a couple of acres of grass to cut. In the back, a field of hay is starting to come up, courtesy of a local farmer. The Yonkofs, though, limit their own farming to their vegetable garden.“When we built this house, we didn’t have neighbors on either side,” Carol Yonkof said. They’ve seen deer, coyotes and fox in the back, although there aren’t any more foxes since the coyotes arrived.
Yonkof grew up in nearby Sheffield Lake, which she described as “almost a cottage community.” It’s where residents of Cleveland had summer homes. She was the oldest of Forrest and Betty Garlitz’ six children. Although she had planned to be an elementary school teacher when she went off to Kent State University, she changed her mind, came home, and went into real estate instead. She found the nature of real estate sales began to change as the area grew, and never went back to the job after her children were born.
“I was your typical stay-at-home mom,” she said. “I was active in the schools and the community. All the kids were in sports year-round.”
Yonkof is fascinated with genealogy and has found an ancestor who came to the United States from Garlitz, Germany.
“He was one of the first settlers in Pennsylvania, in the area where it meets with Maryland and West Virginia,” she said. “He later moved to Maryland, and his descendants were instrumental in building St. Ann’s parish in Avilton, Md.”
The old church is now a shrine in the mountains.
“My grandpap owned a mountain in Maryland,” she said. The family visited frequently in the summers. Yonkof’s parents both were from Maryland, but came to Ohio for his job at Fruehof Trailers.
As the oldest child, Yonkof naturally had responsibilities helping her mother in the kitchen. She said Mrs. Garlitz was a fantastic cook, and she had picked up quite a bit from her at the beginning of her married life, but most of what she knows today she learned by trial and error. “Marty says we ate mostly Hamburger Helper in those days,” she said.
Her repertoire increased as she got involved with the schools, and was often asked to bring food for parish events. “I have a bunch of cookbooks,” she said. “I’ll usually have about four out on the table, and I’ll be doing a little bit from this recipe, a little from that one.”
In that way she’s come up with her own way of making her favorite dishes. For health reasons, she now follows a low-fat and no-salt regimen. “Except for desserts,” she qualified.
“My mom had a recipe for Hungarian nut roll that we had used forever,” she said. “Then I tasted the one they use for the nut rolls at St. Teresa’s (her parish, St. Teresa of Avila). “I thought it was better than my mother’s, so I now make it that way. You just keep learning different ways of doing things.”
The Yonkofs have three young adult children including a daughter who lives in Maryland and is in graduate school and two sons still in college.
McGovern is a freelance writer.
ANDREA MC GOVERN
Carol Yonkof has adapted recipes to reduce her family’s intake of fat and salt so they can enjoy healthy meals without sacrificing flavor.
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