This Feeds Me Hungry Musings of a Gastronomic Gypsy – NC-based freelance writer Victoria Bouloubasis

My mother took this photo of me on my first trip to Greece, in 1985. It is also the first (and probably only) time I rolled phyllo dough, using my Yiayia Koula's utensils. Papou Demetri watches in the background.

In this week’s INDY, I write about Kipos Greek Taverna:

I had the pleasure of knowing both of my grandmothers, who hailed from different regions of Greece. Yiayia Koula lived her entire life in a tiny, land-locked village high in the central mountains, while Yiayia Eleni grew up on a windy, arid island in the Aegean Sea. These environments influenced two very distinct cuisines.

When the families joined, so did all the food traditions. One common thread was the source for many flavors—the kipos, a garden in the yard.

At Kipos Greek Taverna, the new Chapel Hill restaurant by prolific local restaurateur Giorgios Bakatsias, both yiayias would have found a dish reminiscent of their respective village kitchens. After 13 years in the Triangle, I’ve found a local Greek spot that comes closer to my yiayias’ cooking.

Read the full story here. And when you go, definitely order the spanakopita (I’m rolling out the dough for that in the gratuitous baby photo above).

Kipos Greek Taverna. Photo by D.L. Anderson

George Yamazawa, owner and kaiseki chef at Yamazushi in Durham, NC. Photo by D. L. Anderson.

Yamazushi exists as an unparalleled dining experience in the Triangle, serving a traditional, high-end Japanese kaiseki menu in a decades-old strip mall. The story behind the place is a very personal one. It is one of sustenance, survival and the will to keep on.

Many are comparing Chef George Yamazawa to the famed Chef Jiro of Japan. Here’s a fun outtake from one of my interviews with George and his wife, Mayumi:

George leans over to Mayumi and mentions 80-year-old Japanese mountain climber, Yuichiro Miura, who plans to climb Mt. Everest for the third time this year. Mayumi nods and agrees that is a tremendous feat. But she pauses, her hopes of retirement shattered.

“You’re thinking about doing this at 80 years old?”

George is quick to crack a smile: “Well, Jiro-san is 83!”

Read the story of Yamazushi in this week’s INDY.

Sheep's heads and brains on the table at Jemaa el Fna market in Marrakech, Morocco. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis, 2010

This week, I wrote about where to find offal in Wake County. Organ meats, anything that pumps, beats and filters through an animal’s system, can be found at both ethnic eateries and traditional Southern restaurants. Brains, kidneys, intestines: They’re all on the table.

Read the full story here.

(The photo above is one I took in Marrakech, Morocco, where I ate my first slimy bit of brain, from a sheep. It wasn’t bad. For my article I tried them again, as canned hog brains and eggs, a popular Carolina breakfast. It wasn’t good.)

Panamanian singer Yomira John at Shakori Hills. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis 2013

Yomira John isn’t just the type of woman who merely smiles despite every setback. She roars through with laughter.

The Beast, led by frontman Pierce Freelon, met Yomira while in Panama teaching and filming Pierce’s Beat Making Lab. They must’ve been enticed first by her raspy laugh, followed by the impassioned energy in her singing. With a jazzy Latin beat in tow, Apple Juice Kid and Pierce approached the multi-lingual Panamanian songstress one night during carnaval, only a few months ago. Just as they began to film a spontaneous music video, the entire city temporarily lost electricity. The result: a soulful, flirty, irresistible new song with Yomira.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Henry, CEO of TS Designs, in the company office garden in Burlington, NC. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis.

With chickens grazing by his feet, Eric Henry, president of TS Designs, lifts a branch of organic cotton just plucked from the backyard garden of his T-shirt printing business. As if picked from the sky, the puffs of white cotton resemble tiny cumulus clouds hanging from winter branches.

Since the mid-1990s, Henry has helped grow TS Designs, based in Burlington, North Carolina, by turning a highly toxic T-shirt production into a cleaner, safer operation with a conscious and sustainable business model. Part of that has been transforming a traditional Carolina crop into more than just a commodity.

“We have a long history of running around the world and chasing cheap labor. We’ve got to take the blinders off,” Henry says. He specifically places blame on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for the decimation of local cotton production. Since NAFTA, he says 35,000 textile jobs were lost in North Carolina alone.

Read the full story for Rodale Institute. 

Lindsay Perry at home, preparing wild chickweed as food (pesto) and dandelion root as medicine (tincture). Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis (iPhone + Instagram filter)

An occasional bird darts through the gray, late winter sky. Sparse branches offer nothing to nibble on, so the birds move on.

But it is a group of human foragers that hovers over a Durham backyard this afternoon, minding their steps, bending at the knees and leaning their noses toward the ground. Lindsay Perry runs her hands over a lush patch of weeds, their leaves tiny florets with ends pointing out like stars.

“I’m all about the choice, delicious weeds, and not eating what you can eat just for survival,” Perry told friends just moments earlier in her apartment.

Read the rest of the article in this week’s Indy Week.

Chef Matt Props prepares ramen bowls at his pop-up event. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange for Indy Week.

I wrote about a fun Pop-up Ramen Shop hosted by Chef Matt Props and baker Ari Berenbaum at Ninth Street Bakery in February.

“Bowls came out of the kitchen quickly, like ramen should. Props and Berenbaum confessed earlier in the week to bonding over ’90s hip-hop; the evening soundtrack swung from that era to early dance hall. No pretense, no fuss. Just good food.

Noodles disappeared, but the broth remained. People untangled their fingers from the chopsticks and cupped the large, compostable bowls with both hands, slurping the rest.”

The story is still on stands until Wednesday, and online here.

Front page of La Conexión newspaper, week of Feb. 27. La cubierta de La Conexión, la semana de 27 de febrero.

Local Spanish newspaper La Conexión published a photo I took on the front page of their Feb. 27 issue. The accompanying article discusses the attack on DACA-approved youth who, at the time, were being denied their drivers licenses. I took the photo at a rally outside of the NCDOT in January organized by Mayra Torres (pictured) and the NC DREAM Team. More photos of the rally here.

Below is a personal essay I wrote for the Indy Week, on stands now.

Most of us have a soundtrack to our lives, a mental playlist we retrieve at the moments we find most celebratory or unbearable or just right. For much of my early childhood, mine came from a 1950s tabletop diner jukebox.

From the late 1980s through the ’90s, my grandparents, Hercules and Helen Amprazis, owned Athens Diner, a shiny beacon of hot blue-plate specials in the dreary, industrial city of Harrison, N.J.

In my adolescent imagination, the diner’s aluminum exterior looked like a huge roll of tinfoil stretched wide to make a roadside mirror against the backdrop of smog. I’d watch from the backseat of my mom’s 1984 black Oldsmobile as we’d slowly swoop into the parking lot, the reflection of the car’s broad bumper distorted into rolling waves.

I remember waltzing through the heavy double doors at the age of 3, feeling like I owned the place. I’d follow the waitress to a corner booth and hand-deliver a frigid steel tumbler of malted milkshake all by myself. Sometimes, I’d get a crisp dollar for my efforts.

But I preferred coins. With a dime, I could clamber up a swiveling stool at the counter and plop myself onto its round, shimmering red vinyl seat. Stationed between a Heinz ketchup bottle and a fat, glass sugar shaker, the Seeburg Wall-O-Matic gleamed in its square, chrome body, soft-lit by neon hues. I couldn’t read yet, but I knew with 10 cents and the press of two buttons—one top letter and one bottom number—I’d get a melody.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Leon Godwin.

In December, I wrote about Joe Kwon’s friendly supper club for Slow Food USA’s Stories of a Slow Food Nation project. A night of amazing food, hilarious conversation and unexpected twists.

Trampled by labradoodle. It’s what I imagined my death notice would say. For a fleeting moment, I pictured my poor mother spending years agonizing over losing her first-born to a supper club accident at a rockstar’s house, and in a way that wasn’t very rockstar at all.

Read the full story.

Lauren Hodge's two-bite mincemeat pies. Delicious, not daunting. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange.

In researching this story, I found the following surprise fact: In 1907, a Chicago man was arrested for shooting his wife in the head. A pie, he said, made him do it. Mincemeat pie.

Locally, the nightmarish pie resonated with folks that came from British stock and left the tradition behind, and older adults of a more Southern-American heritage with vague memories of a blubbery dish. The one commonality: a resounding aversion to mincemeat pie.

Except for one person.

“Hi, this is Lauren, Eric Hodge’s wife,” began the voicemail. And here’s where her voice bellowed, balancing from jovial to serious, rivaling that of her husband’s famous newscaster inflection. Drawing out every word, she declared: “I’m calling to defend the mince pie.”

Read the full story, including Lauren Hodge’s recipe for mince pie.

As incongruous as it seems, white navy beans create an impressive dessert when whipped into custard. Many attribute the original recipe to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who wrote the cookbook How to Eat to Live, which prescribed a clean diet for African-American Muslims in the 1960s. But in the online documentary, Bean Pie, My Brother, Muhammad’s son Jabir says today’s bean pie evolved from a recipe by Lana Shabazz, personal chef to Muhammad Ali.

Outside Jamaat Ibad Ar-Rahman on Fayetteville Street, dozens of crimson and magenta pomegranates radiate from a cardboard box. A man shakes a sizzling trout filet from a boiling pan of oil, while a line of people form beside him. They move past a row of tables, plucking falafel rounds and sticky baklava from multiple trays. My requests for the bean pie prove futile.

A man named Omar tells me that his friend, Naim, “makes a mean bean pie, the best this side of Texas. He’s just not here today.” I could never find him, so a few calls later, I’m directed to Kasib Abdullah. Although his restaurant, New Visions of Africa, 1306 Fayetteville St., remains closed after a year of renovations, the door is still open to Abdullah’s nonprofit, Believers United For Progress. The organization runs several programs, including a summer community kitchen feeding school-age children.

Read the full story. (with recipe)

A towering meringue by Brooke Erceg, owner of Cup A Joe in Hillsborough. She is still perfecting her grandmother's recipe. Photo by D.L. Anderson.

“It’s just a bit weepy,” says Brooke Erceg as she coos over a lemon meringue.

Tiny brown pearls of liquid sugar slide down the peaks of snow-white meringue as it wiggles, elevated at least 4 inches from the lemon custard pooled into the crust. Erceg settles her pie onto a table at Cup A Joe in Hillsborough.

“The first couple of pies were terrible!” Erceg exclaims. “They tasted good, but they weeped a lot. They cried overnight. Six years from now I won’t have any weeping. The first few years, they were just these big tears.”

Pie really is her baby. She has revived a baking tradition that was handed down to her by her late grandmother, Pauline Erceg.

Read the full story here. (with recipe)

Pavlos Georgiadis is a fourth-generation olive farmer in Greece and one of the founders of Slow Food's Youth Network. Photo via SFYN.

I met Pavlos Georgiadis, Georgia Arvanitidou, and other Greek youth at Terra Madre. They are working toward providing a viable solution to Greece’s economic crisis through agriculture and healthy food systems. Part of their work includes a documentary series, found at vimeo.com/foodpolitics.  As a Greek-American observing the crisis from afar, a crisis affecting my family and friends living in Greece, their work felt especially inspiring. I wrote about it for the Huffington Post.

Popular perception of Greece teeters between two extremes. One is based on serene, mystic island landscapes and a carefree gusto for life. The other extreme, the most present, is a daunting and glaring depiction of a dire economic crisis rife with violent civil riots, political rancor and an unrelenting sense of despair.

A new generation of young food activists strives to portray a more balanced idea of Greece. Pavlos Georgiadis, a 29-year-old PhD student and farmer, is leading a charge to portray a Greece that honors her ancient land and rich agricultural traditions bearing thousands of years of experience.

“Farming on Crisis?”, a series of documentary shorts produced by Georgiadis and other Greek youth, will be among 20 films screening at Los Angeles’ ArcLight Cinemas 2nd Annual Documentary Film Festival on Nov. 5-8. The videos depict a Greece you would only know if you see for yourself — a countryside landscape rolling in olive groves, a scene set by the harmonious cacophony of the cicadas buzzing. Georgiadis travels throughout the country interviewing young farmers, small-scale and conventional, to answer the question of how the economic crisis affects food security issues, and whether sustainable agriculture is a viable solution.

In a very real sense, Georgiadis and his young team aim to reclaim their country’s dignity.

“Greece is only now discovering the power of civil society,” he says in an interview over coffee, narrowing his eyes intently before continuing. “There has been cheap money for too many people. And our cities aren’t functional any more. There is obviously a new road for civil society and for farmers.”

Read the full article here.

Chef Ricky Moore with a fresh catch at Saltbox Seafood Joint. Photo by Jeremy M. Lange

“That came straight from the coast,” owner Ricky Moore shouts, one hand knuckle-deep in flour while the other reaches for the deep fryer. “I got it this morning.”

Read the full review of Saltbox Seafood Joint, a tiny takeout restaurant owned by former Iron Chef contestant Ricky Moore.