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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Goats and I share a complex history. I wrote about it for Indy’s Front Porch last week. Every Greek Easter, I’ve relished in the crispy skin peeled straight from a roasted goat’s flesh. Until, that is, I witnessed the birth of a baby goat on a farming stint in Portugal. My indulgent, borderline barbaric behavior [...]

…on my 28th birthday, surrounded by great food, laughter, goats and farmers, the Casa do Burro felt like home.

On a calculated whim this past summer, I set off for a three-month stint to volunteer on organic farms on Portugal’s Algarve coast. My wanderlust needed a fix and my mind needed a stimulant. In covering local NC sustainable agriculture for the past couple of years, I craved the first-hand knowledge to really understand the movement.

Like any wildly nostalgic Greek-American tourist, I sipped, slurped, nibbled and devoured everything I could in four weeks.

The recent issue of Saveur draws the hungry reader into a lair revealing Greece’s most prized possession: her food. For this trip to Greece, that magazine has since become my most coveted travel possession. Through delayed flights, a two-day London stopover, a creepy hostel stay,  train troubles, baggage malfunction and countless hours in airports, that [...]

We zig-zagged our way through tube transit and were spit out a couple of miles from Brick Lane, the famed Indian restaurant row of London. Our walk led us through less bricks and more cement. The industrial-looking area seemed barren, yet a couple of hours later became flooded with young hipsters looking for a party. [...]

After sampling Camden Market’s food stalls my first night in London, I sipped on a Pimm’s lemonade, completely satisfied. I figured we were through eating. “Ready for dinner?,” Danny asked. He took me off guard, but I didn’t have the heart to deny the boy a real, full meal. And once we settled on Chinatown, [...]

Eat, drink, walk, in no particular order. That’s all I set out to do in London, and it’s exactly what I accomplished. I scheduled two days in the city prior to my arrival in Greece to catch up with an old friend and see something new. I had been to London before as a student [...]

As I hinted in an earlier post, my friends are artistic chefs at heart. Especially Victor Hugo. In the kitchen, as in life, this guy flies by the seat of his pantalones. Inspired at the oddest of hours, he’ll shuffle from fridge to spice cabinet and back to fridge, carrying an assortment of ingredients to [...]

When it comes to food, my friends share my obsession. My fondest recent food memories include moments with my friends in Carrboro, or La Banda, as we’ve dubbed ourselves, gathered around an oven adding spices and herbs (and our “two cents”) onto a leg of lamb,  standing at a kitchen table spreading cookies with dulce [...]

I’ll be posting the Independent Weekly‘s Now Serving column each week. I alternate writing this column every four weeks or so with the wonderful and witty Claire Cusick. Here’s this week’s column. Highlights include Downtown Raleigh Restaurant Week (eat local!). Living the buena vida by Victoria Bouloubasis When I was 19, I spent six months [...]