Rootstock Radio Interview with Lola Milholland Air Date: October 8, 2018 Welcome to Rootstock Radio. Join us as host Theresa Marquez talks to leaders from the Good Food movement about food, farming, and our global future. Rootstock Radio—propagating a healthy planet. Now, here’s host Theresa Marquez. THERESA MARQUEZ: Hello, and welcome to Rootstock Radio. I’m Theresa Marquez, and I’m here today with Lola Milholland. She’s the founder of a business called Umi Organic. She’s a creative food event planner and an award-winning writer and multimedia producer. Welcome, Lola! LOLA MILHOLLAND: Hello! TM: I’m so happy to have you here, Lola, and be talking with you. And I guess I should tell our listeners that you actually are my daughter. LM: Yes. TM: I think that’s only fair! But I’m so looking forward to talking with you because there are so many things that you’ve done that I don’t know whether I even have gone into just how much food fun you have. And tell me, what inspires you to do these things? Didn’t you just do something called the Ice Cream Social? LM: It was our third time in, I don’t know, maybe seven years—very sporadic—doing an Experimental Ice Cream Social, where people who love to make ice cream tend to think of wild flavors, come together, and bring all their homemade ice cream. And then anyone who attends gets to be a judge. So it just is an opportunity for people who want to be really playful. I think ice cream’s a really good template for that, to come out and make super strange, sometimes delicious, sometimes disgusting, always inventive ice creams. TM: So tell us about a few of them. LM: Well, my friend Jordan Behr, who I love and is often part of my food events, he is typically making the wildest ice cream that’s there. So the first year, he made a tobacco-marshmallow ice cream— TM: Eew! LM: —that people had very sharp feelings for or against. I like the marshmallow as a concept—it’s almost like the smoke, like a, you know, a metaphor for the cloud of smoke. And then the next time he did a tom kha ice cream. So, you know, a tom kha typically would be a Thai coconut curry with chicken or maybe mushrooms, eggplant, but his was an ice cream flavor, and it had that makrut lime, the lime leaf, and galangal. It was delicious. And this time he made a pink peppercorn sharpie but it was ice cream. TM: (Laughing) Oh no, that sounds terrible! But were they actually edible? 1 LM: Yeah, I think so. I mean, the tobacco one was a little too much for me, but these last two—I mean, to my shock, the sharpie one tasted like sharpie and also was kind of delicious. TM: Oh no… So what about the—didn’t you do granita? I was kind of taken with your melon ice cream. LM: Yeah, yeah! So I had written an article when I was writing for Edible Portland about horchata (or orxata). TM: Tell our listeners what an horchata is, just in case they don’t know. LM: So I think that most people think of horchata as a rice-based, like a sweet rice-based drink that you would get when you were ordering tacos, maybe, at a Mexican restaurant, and tends to have cinnamon flavor to it—quite sweet but refreshing, served over ice. But I had been seeing different horchatas around town, and I was kind of interested in this really wonderful nonprofit in Portland called Hacienda CDC [Community Development Corporation], and they were helping Latino food entrepreneurs connect with the Portland food community, and eventually they actually built a public market. This was before that. And so it turns out horchata is actually a much more diverse item than we typically see. It is made from any number of grains and seeds, and depending on where you are in Central America you would see really different types of horchatas. And the one that this woman, Amalia, made was made from cantaloupe seeds. So she actually would rinse cantaloupe seeds and blend them with almonds that she’d skinned and make a milk out of it. And it’s just this beautiful milk that tastes like faintly of melon, that aural flavor. You can’t quite tell what it is, but it’s creamy and white. So the fruit you have to just eat, but the seeds make a delicious milk. And so one of my categories this year was nondairy, and I made a melon milk ice cream, where I made an horchata from the cantaloupe-seed milk. I added a simple syrup I’d made with cinnamon stick and lime juice, and then I blended that in my ice cream maker. And it was very delicious, if I don’t say so myself. So the Experimental Ice Cream Social is super silly. Sometimes I feel like it’s good to, in a world that’s full of lots of heavy things, that while we’re working towards different goals, to remember to have silly kinds of fun. (5:57) TM: So Lola, I really would love for you to talk about one of my favorite events that I attended, and I know you did it quite a few times: Blind Tasting Bingo! LM: Yeah, so the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, PICA, which is a really wonderful organization we have here, was hosting their annual festival—it’s called Time-Based Art, TBA—and they asked me if I would coordinate the food. And typically that just means making sure there’s an option on hand so that people can drink and party at the venue where these just amazing artists perform. And I kind of bargained with them and said, “Hey, if I’m going to coordinate the food, I’d also like to put on some of my own, stage some of my own, events.” And at the time, I was working at Ecotrust, a nonprofit, and one of my colleagues and really dear friends, Jeanne Kubel, is just a really experienced, talented event planner. So I decided to rope her in, and she said, “I have this idea, Blind Tasting Bingo—I just don’t know what it is. It’s just like an idea that I have.” So she and I began to take those words and build an event concept around it. 2 And I recruited local chefs. And the way that it works is that we would have one chef make a series of small bites, and then we would make a bingo board. And you would taste these items blindfolded, and then you would have a chance to circle on the board what you thought you were tasting. And the first person to get a bingo would be the winner, but everyone would eat their way through the entire menu. So it was a chance for chefs to be really playful with their flavor combinations and composing really beautiful tastes, and serve an interesting experience for eaters, with their eyes closed, to try to kind of understand what they were tasting. TM: So do you think that people who participated, did they learn about different food? Was it more than just tasting, it was kind of like educational? LM: I think it was a lot of different things. I think it was really experiential with food in a context where people don’t usually think of food—contemporary art. So it allowed some chefs in Portland, who are talented artists in their own right, to be on that stage with other artists. I thought that was really neat. We also mostly focused on women chefs, which is sort of a theme for me. And then for the eaters, I do feel like we have a culture of rushing through our food in America, and I think like really lingering over what you’re tasting and sort of like letting your tongue do the thinking and finding pleasure in that is a really sweet pastime. So… TM: Tell us about your potluck that everyone who brings a dish, it needs to be a—what do you call it?—a piece of art. LM: Yeah, so this is an idea my friend Midori Hirose had. She’s an amazing artist here in Portland. And I think you’ll find that a lot of these events that I’ve been part of, I have people around me who are inspiring me, or themselves have ideas, and I often am a little bit of like the motor to make it go. I can figure out all the little cups and spoons, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, and so at some point she had this idea, and she recruited me and my brother Zach to be her cohosts. And she called it “Meatspace,” like meat like carne, carnal. And we put out the invites—you know, bring a food sculpture; it has to be 100 percent edible. And we’ve been hosting it in backyards. And they’re super silly. I mean, like they can get really conceptual, they can get really basic. The first year, two people brought log cabins made out of hot dogs. That was just surprising. (Laughing.) TM: But at the same time, you can imagine a log cabin. I mean, did it really look like a log cabin? LM: Yeah, I thought so.