Bolo Bash Lunch bountiful
Georgia Pellegrini — celebrity author, chef and outdoor adventure expert — brought her message of clean, healthful home cooking and eating to the annual Bolo Bash Luncheon. The event took place April 19 in the J.A. Gilbreath Conference Center at Baptist Health’s main Little Rock campus. This year’s beneficiary was the Charity Food Box Program, in which boxes of Arkansas-grown food (along with nutrition education) are distributed to families in need. Themed “Pioneering Happiness” as a nod to the modern-day-pioneer lifestyle advocated by Pellegrini, the luncheon attracted its usual large crowd of mostly women. Vegetables were on display in the lobby and showed up in visually stunning table centerpieces. Guests browsed the silent auction, enjoyed passed hors d’oeuvres and posed for photo-booth photos. They sat down to a lunch prepared by chef Len Thompson that included beef tenderloin and Laughing Bird shrimp with Bang Bang sauce. Missy Lewis, chief development officer for Baptist Health Foundation, welcomed all. Millie Ward steered the program, which included a film on the effects of the Charity Food Box Program in the town of Altheimer. Pellegrini, best-selling author of Girl Hunter, Food Heroes and Modern Pioneering, talked about how she grew up as a do-it-yourselfer and how the living-off-the-land habits of her family elders influenced her — “She taught me to stop and smell the rosemary,” she said of her grandmother Pellegrini. Their lifestyle, she added, “wasn’t about survival. It was a way of life.” Pellegrini went on to discuss the benefits of getting one’s hands in the dirt, so to speak. The luncheon garnered more than $176,000, according to Heather Zimmerman, the foundation’s major gifts officer. — Story and photos by Helaine R. Williams