60 Plus Omaha - June 2019

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HIS JUNE ISSUE is all about food.

In past years, this issue has been one of our most popular.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when my children were very young, we seldom went out to eat as families do now. Some of their favorite homemade meals were hamburger pie, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti with meat sauce, and fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy.

I remember when the first McDonald’s in Omaha opened at 80th and Dodge streets.

It was in February 1960, and the restaurant was very noticeable with its golden arches and a big sign that said “One Million Hamburgers” had been sold. A hamburger from McDonald’s was 15 cents, which was a great price even then.

Bronco’s has claimed to be Omaha’s first locally owned and operated fast-food restaurant. They opened in 1959 at 30th and Fort streets and are still famous for their french fries.

Once these fast-food restaurants opened, it didn’t take long for families with young children to start going out to eat more often. Now you can find one every few blocks.

Omaha has so many wonderful restaurants.

Whether you are looking for an upscale, elegant one to celebrate a special occasion or a family place in which to sit down with menus for children, you will find it in Omaha.

Bon appétit.

Contributing Editor

Lowell Wilhite JUNE 2019 • 60PLUS

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ACTIVE LIVING // STORY BY CHARLIE LITTON // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN // DESIGN BY DEREK JOY

The Virtues of

Barbecue Low & Slow

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You gotta put some love into it to make it “good.

You gotta do it with care and love or else don’t bother with it.

THERE IS A SECRET INGREDIENT for

really good barbecue. The kind that wins competitions. The kind that is hard to replicate in a restaurant.

Good, competition-worthy barbecue is special. No small amount of effort goes into it. A mother might—might—fuss more over a newborn. She might also get more sleep.

It is difficult to smoke meat commercially with the same level of quality as a competition. Good barbecue takes time, a luxury many restaurants can’t afford, says Lowell Wilhite, 68, a certified master judge with the Kansas City Barbeque Society, or KCBS for short.

“You gotta put some love into it to make it good,” he says. “You gotta do it with care and love or else don’t bother with it.”

Originally from Jefferson City, Missouri, Wilhite is a retired IT project manager who has lived in Omaha since the early 1970s. He worked for 22 years at Mutual of Omaha before joining First Data, then closed out his career as a project consultant for firms like eBay, PayPal, and Ralph Lauren.

He has been deeply involved in the Omaha barbecue scene for nearly as long, joining the Greater Omaha Barbeque Society shortly after its founding. He went on to serve as a board member, president, and treasurer.

In 1998, Wilhite qualified as a certified barbecue judge, and in 2013 qualified as a master certified judge for KCBS, the world’s largest and most widely known barbecue organization. Certification requires specific training and practical experience as a cook and competitor.

He knows firsthand how difficult it can be to make magic with the notoriously persnickety brisket.

”

“I learned that it’s a lot of work and a lot of money,” Wilhite says. “It’s a lot easier to judge,” he adds with a laugh.

Equipment, time, and resources are certainly important, but elevating decent barbecue into something special requires more.

What else—if not love—can compel someone to spend 12-14 hours carefully stoking and maintaining a slow and low burn of hot smoke? Missing pre-dawn sleep in the darkest hours to nurture dimly lit embers that couldn’t warm a cup of coffee? All for what? Smokeflavored meat?

No matter how mouth-watering, tender, and delicious it may be, properly cooked barbecue isn’t as forgiving as grilling burgers and brats. There’s a reason most people order pizza for the big-game viewing party.

Cooking a brisket? That takes time and next-level patience.

“I have cooked a brisket in eight hours… but I don’t like to do it that fast,” Wilhite says.

As for sauce? Don’t go there.

In fact, barbecue often means indirect heat, where the heat from wood smoke simultaneously flavors and gently cooks the meat to divine tenderness. Ideal temperatures range between 200- and 250-degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, cooking ribs, a pork shoulder, or a brisket is an all-day affair—or all night if noon is the targeted feast time.

“225 is the minimum I cook at,” Wilhite says. “At 225 you’re safe. That’s low and slow enough.”

There are many good resources for the curious and those looking to raise their outdoor cooking game with the art of low and slow, including specialized stores and websites. They offer gear, equipment, and expertise.

Even better, attend a barbecue competition.

Most cooks and judges enjoy chatting up folks who want to learn, Wilhite says.

There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

“What’s better than sitting around, smelling barbecue smoke, and drinking beer?” he says. “It can’t be all bad.”

Visit gobs.org for more information.

Wilhite has judged 51 KCBS-sanctioned competitions over the years, and the quickest way to the wrong side of one of his pet peeves is spending undue focus on sauce. The meat is supposed to be the star—sauce is an afterthought.

The most common mistake he sees is a lack of patience. Patience is the key virtue for barbecuing, which is not to be mistaken for grilling.

Grilling involves searing heat directly applied to steaks and burgers for quick— and delicious—cooking. Barbecue, however, is about taking the toughest cuts of meat and turning them into morsels of joy with low heat and excruciatingly long cooking times.

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FEATURE // STORY BY ANDREA KSZYSTYNIAK // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN // DESIGN BY DEREK JOY

Monica Brown bakes with her family, (from left): niece Mary Vankat, nephew Thomas Vankat, grandson Benny Brown, and nieces Cecilia and Barbara Vankat.

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was a child, he walked the five blocks from his parents’ Omaha home to his grandparents’ every Saturday. There, he and his five sisters would play games, take walks, and cook with his Czech grandmother.

“It wasn’t a choice for my parents,” he says. “We were expected to be there.”

Melichar, now 64, would watch as grandma crafted and cooked and stewed and baked. He’d pop in to assist—peeling potatoes, making salad dressing, and wrapping weenies for the pigs-in-a-blanket recipe. Recipes for chicken paprika, kolaches, pork roast, and dumplings would clear his grandmother’s stove and then enter his mouth.

Now that he has children of his own, he’s taught them some of the recipes. His middle son, Andy, makes dumplings and kolaches. All of his children have learned the family recipe for chicken paprika.

“They weren’t fond of sauerkraut so that’s something that’s lost to the generations,” he says.

These traditions vary from family to family. But for many Omaha Czechs, food is a multi-generational language.

Monica Vankat Brown’s grandmother made vánočka (also called houska) when Brown was a child. The plated yeast bread is flavored with mace (which is made from nutmeg and a Vankat family addition) and filled with white raisins and almonds. Topped with icing, red and green candied cherries, and whole pecans, it’s typically served during the holiday season.

Brown is one of 10 children, meaning her mother never had much time for baking; she was often too busy with her children.

So when Brown’s grandma passed away, Monica tried to make her own vánočka for the first time. But grandma didn’t leave her recipe. Though only 13, Brown figured it out on her own. She and her family have made the bread every year since; Brown is now 62.

Constructing this Christmas bread initially began as a small event—30 or so family members in a house. But then the kids got involved and 20 loaves turned into 40 loaves. To accommodate the growing number of loaves, the family moved the operation out of a house and into a home economics room at Mercy High School.

Every Christmas season three generations of her family—about 60 people—gather to craft 100 loaves to share and eat.

That’s 25 batches, baked and decorated

by Brown’s Czech family.

“My family, we are very big eaters and food is a central part of every gathering that we have,” Brown says. “It’s almost to the point of being ridiculous.”

When it comes to food staples, every Czech seems to have their own rules of play. And often, those recipes are wellguarded. When Melichar would go to his grandparents to bake kolache, often the dough was already made or halfway started.

“She was kinda funny about kolaches,” Melichar says. “As I got older, I’d ask her for a recipe and she goes, ‘Oh, you don’t want to know that.’”

Brown says when she was growing up in South Omaha, Czech food was readily available. There were Czech butchers, bakeries, and cafes. Old Vienna Cafe, a restaurant on South 24th Street, served traditional Czech cuisine. But over the years, it has gotten harder to come by.

“It was like saying goodbye to a friend,” Melichar says.

In spite of familial secrecy and a dwindling local restaurant scene, Czech recipes are still making it down the chain.

Millie Svagera Marne, 87, helped her mother grind poppy seeds for kolaches each Saturday. Now, she’s teaching her son David the recipes; explaining how to scald milk to create dough and how to appropriately stomp down the kolache so the filling doesn’t leak out. She says he also wants to learn to make dumplings.

“But I’m working on these yeast dumplings to get those perfected,” Marne says.

Marie Sedlacek, the president of the Omaha Czech Cultural Club, learned about Czech food mostly through eating it—her mother cooked often. Sedlacek also participated in Omaha Sokol, which featured cultural events and dinners attended by everybody in the local Czech community.

Nowadays, some of the people who are most interested and closely related to Czech culture are older, Sedlacek says.

But those who remain involved are very invested. Sedlacek says she makes it a point to share recipes with friends and others in the community.

“Cooking something with intention and knowing what you’re doing is another way of conveying love to your family and passing down traditions,” she says.

Melichar says a lot of Czech kids growing up now may not know the food unless someone in their family happens to cook it.

The 2016 closing of Bohemian Cafe was a deathblow to an already depleted culinary scene. For Czechs, the Bohemian Cafe represented a connection to food lineage. Melichar’s grandparents hung out there; it was the social place to go.

The closure was an elimination of a staple.

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NOSTALGIA // STORY BY KARA SCHWEISS // PHOTOGRAPHY BY CONTRIBUTED // DESIGN BY DEREK JOY

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Deb Price’s parents,

Larry and

Esther Price, sold King’s Food Host restaurants nearly 50 years ago, but she says locals still harbor nostalgia for the chain.

Cheese “frenchees” (sometimes spelled “frenchies”) may appear on local menus today, but no one has ever really duplicated the original, Price says. The influence of King’s, however, lingers in restaurants such as Don and Millie’s, which was started

by King’s alum Dean Rasmussen.

King’s started in Lincoln in 1955 and grew to 150 locations in 17 U.S. states and Canada, and was named for coowner James King, who left the business in 1960. The Facebook page Price helps manage was launched by an enthusiast in 2012 and now has 1,200 fans. The restaurant is also a regular topic on local Facebook pages like Forgotten Omaha and Omaha History Club.

People who know of, or discover, Price’s connection to the restaurant love to share their memories, she says. They talk about branding details such as the big crown signage or the iconic diamond pattern appearing on everything from wallpaper to napkins; or smaller elements such as the branded silverware or the plastic hand puppets and King’s Kids figurines for young diners. But when it comes to the food, virtually everyone will talk about three particular menu items.

“When people talk about King’s, what they remember is the Cheese Frenchee, the onion rings, and the chocolate shakes,” she says. “My dad invented the Cheese Frenchee.”

Cheese “frenchees” (sometimes spelled “frenchies”) may appear on local menus today, but no one has ever really duplicated the original, Price says. The influence of King’s, however, lingers in restaurants such as Don and Millie’s, which was started by King’s alum Dean Rasmussen.

The crown once rose above streets all over the city. Price recalls that in Omaha alone, two stand-up King’s restaurants graced either end of Westroads Mall when it opened in 1967, joining freestanding brick-and-mortar locations on 72nd and Cass, 72nd and L, 30th and Farnam, and 16th and Howard streets, among others.

However, the restaurant business was just one of her father’s endeavors. “He started entrepreneurship at age 11 selling pop on the corner of 27th and O in Lincoln,” she says. He was also a Nebraska Wesleyan University football and basketball coach, a police officer, a mail carrier, a grocer, and a real-estate developer—sometimes juggling more than one career at a time.

Deb says Larry thought outside the box, with ideas that were “way, way beyond his time,” such as a coffee bar inside a grocery store in the 1940s or following a locally sourced philosophy decades before the term locally sourced even existed.

“My dad grew up dirt poor and became a self-made millionaire,” she says.

The Prices also shared their wealth, though they were somewhat quiet philanthropists. “It’s important for people to know my mom and dad gave back to the community.” And while the public usually associates her father with King’s, Price says her parents built the franchise together.

King’s didn’t last long after being sold to investors. “The investors were more about quantity than quality,” Price explains, and diners could tell the difference.

Some of the buildings now house other restaurant brands or different businesses.

But Price holds a premier collection of King’s memorabilia: framed menus and photos; trademarked aprons, hats, and silverware; even some of the booths with a telephone receiver once used for ordering and a large backlit menu.

“I see items on eBay, but it’s always things I already have,” she says. As for her impressive collection, Price says she would be open to lending items to a history organization or museum for an exhibition the public could enjoy, but she wouldn’t sell any of it.

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HEALTH // STORY BY TAMSEN BUTLER // DESIGN BY DEREK JOY

E

veryone knows Type 2 diabetes is caused by bad foods. Everyone also knows you can reverse Type 2 diabetes by eating the right foods if you work hard enough to not give in to temptations.

Everyone is wrong.

A Complex Disease Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disease and there is no way to “reverse” it— although it can be put into remission.

“It’s not just about insulin and body fat,” says Meghan McLarney, nutritionist and certified diabetes nutrition educator at Nebraska Medicine.

During her rotations as a student, McLarney kept encountering people with a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes who “felt guilty about the disease,” she says. “The disease and the people are misunderstood. Everybody is blaming each other, but it’s a super-complex disease with a strong genetic component.” She adds that those affected often do not feel supported or get information they need due to assumptions—internal and external— that the disease is uncontrolled because of their eating habits.

“Portion control alone will not fix diabetes,” McLarney says.

While diet is a primary treatment for the disease, it should be individualized to fit the person and their blood sugar management.

“For example, a low-carb diet might be good for a person who only has blood sugar spikes when they eat high-carb meals but it won’t make an impact on blood sugars for a person who has trouble with sugars rising overnight—that person might respond better to weight loss or a daily walk but not see a big benefit from a strict low-carb diet.”

“There is more than one way to treat Type 2 diabetes,” she continues. “And there is not one ‘diabetes diet.’” Recent research suggests that people with Type 2 diabetes may have issues with their brain not receiving the signal quickly enough that they’re full from a meal, causing them to overeat. If that’s the case, it’s not the overeating that causes the Type 2 diabetes, but rather the Type 2 diabetes that causes the overeating.

“It’s part of your DNA,” McLarney says.

Typically, patients receiving a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes are encouraged to exercise more, eat smaller portions, reduce their intake of sugar and simple carbs, and increase their intake of vegetables and fruit. The goal is to control blood sugar, and while many patients turn to highprotein diets (or even high-fat ones, such as the ketogenic diet), McLarney says that diets “wear people out.”

“Avoid all-or-nothing and instead think long term. Talk to a diabetes educator to make sure any diet you want to try is safe for you.”

McLarney says patients over the age of 40 often find weight loss to be “an uphill battle,” adding “It’s harder to lose weight because our metabolism slows down with age.” Weight loss helps control Type 2 diabetes because it typically involves exercise, which actively uses blood sugar as energy, she explains.

“If someone found a dietary cure for diabetes, I’d be working with those people.

It’s not fair to say it’s simple.”

McLarney says that within Type 2 diabetes, there are different “types,” making it impossible to make one blanket dietary suggestion appropriate for all people with the diagnosis. There are eight possible metabolic problems with Type 2 diabetes, called the Ominous Octet. “You might have one of the eight, or you might have all eight,” she says.

More Complications For adults over 60, the challenges and risks from diabetes become even greater.

McLarney says there are unique factors involved for this age set, and encourages them to seek more frequent assessment of their nutrition and medical care.

“Older adults need the same amount of vitamins, minerals, protein, carbohydrates, fats, and fluids as they did in younger years,” she says. “But overall calorie needs are decreased.” This is why it’s easy to lose muscle mass, strength, and overall nutrition status when trying to lose weight.

McLarney recommends meals that include carbohydrate foods high in nutrients—Greek yogurt, beans, whole grains, low-fat milk, and high-fiber fruits such as strawberries and pears are excellent choices.

Because some medications influence the absorption of vitamin B12, it’s also important to take supplements. Those with vegan and vegetarian diets are especially at risk for a B12 deficiency, so McLarney says regular screenings of B12 status are important.

She adds that depression and mental status changes are more likely in older adults with vitamin deficiencies, as well as older adults with diabetes. For this reason, they should be regularly screened for both.

Another special concern for older adults is hypoglycemia, also known as low blood sugar (defined as any number under 70). Cognitive deficits among older adults have been associated with increased risk of hypoglycemia, and, conversely, severe hypoglycemia has been linked to increased risk of dementia.

McLarney says it’s important to know that a normal part of healthy living is talking with someone about your struggles, and this is especially important with a chronic disease. She says there are programs at the Engage Wellness Center at UNMC for anyone who needs help managing their diabetes.

For her part, McLarney says she takes a holistic view with her patients, asking them about their lifestyles before making recommendations. “It’s a health literacy issue explaining what their role is instead of blaming them. We have to make an effort in healthcare to ask not just how people eat, but how they learn and think.”

Visit unmc.edu/engage for more information.

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