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.

Immediately, Pierce sent a text message to Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival organizer Sara Waters and urged her to book Yomira for their sets. Upon return, they watched the video shot by cell phone light and candles, and Sara needed no convincing. Neither did I, when Pierce asked me to tag along Friday night and serve as Yomira’s English to Spanish interpreter.

But other forces, it seems, attempted to derail the whole thing. A tornado warning delayed Yomira’s flight. A dead car battery left Pierce temporarily stranded coming from Raleigh. And strong winds flipped the hood, crashing it into the windshield of bandmate Eric Hirsch’s car as they drove to RDU airport.

The Beast performs with Panamanian singer Yomira John at Shakori Hills, April 19, 2013. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

But there was power. Lots of it. By the time I arrived to meet her, Yomira’s electric aura had already fused with Pierce’s eternal optimism. The dark, long road to Shakori, its curves slick with mud, could have been tense. Instead, Yomira’s carefree chat about her work (the years she sang backup for both Ricky Martin and Luis Miguel) and life (her decades spent living in both Mexico and France) gave all severe weather warnings the back seat.

By 12:30 a.m., The Beast hit the stage and instantly lit it up like the swift swipe of a matchstick. With the horns, the cello, the violin, percussion and keys, there wasn’t any chance it would cool down. Just after 1 a.m., Yomira marched onto stage and set it ablaze with her booming voice. Her hips took coy detours into salsa and the crowd stomped its own barefoot steps into the mud.

On the ride home, we stopped to give Yomira her first taste of Cookout. Despite the hot lights and dynamic performance, Yomira still smelled of  baby powder and gardenia. Indefatigable, and with half of her luggage still in the backseat, she rummaged through her instruments and played the harmonica for us. Pierce handed her a Cookout tray just as she finished scratching a gourd instrument. She cradled a grilled chicken sandwich and poked at the fries.

Smiling brightly, she repeated a phrase she used throughout the night: todo es mágico. Everything is magic.

(To view all of my photos from Yomira and The Beast’s performance, click here. For permission to use or publish, please email me at victoria [at] thisfeedsme [dot] com.)

Pierce Freelon and The Beast at Shakori Hills, Spring 2013. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis.

Yomira John performs with The Beast. Shakori Hills, April 2013. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

Pierce Freelon's muddy shoes after a jump into the crowd at Shakori Hills. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

The crowd at The Beast, Shakori Hills, 2013. Photo by Victoria Bouloubasis

Pierce Freelon and Yomira John. Shakori Hills Grassroots Music Festival, 2013.

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.

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.

I recently turned 30. I’m not sure many people of my generation can remember flipping through a tabletop jukebox, especially this side of the Mason-Dixon Line, where aluminum-sided diners seem obsolete. (I know about the one in Cary. Built in the 1990s for kitsch effect and hauled over from Florida, it’s just not the same.)

My grandparents didn’t seem to mind what type of music blared through any of the jukeboxes. According to my grandfather, they didn’t make much of a profit.

“They never made me no money,” he recalls. “Say I made $100 in two weeks from all those quarters and dimes. I paid $5 per week for the service, and then we’d split $95 fifty-fifty.”

“Racketeering!” he says, laughing, with a heavily accented emphasis on the first “r.” That’s what he thought of the vending machine operators and their little scheme.

For me, choosing from the diner menu never posed a problem. I wanted a pizza burger deluxe (that’s with fries), unless the chicken parmesan was on special.

The trick was picking out my soundtrack.

At age 6, I’d press the lever that flipped through every sheet of options, sounding out the name of every band and the two accompanying song choices. The year was 1988. Kylie Minogue had made her American debut with “Locomotion,” and my musical tastes were just developing. Our household didn’t have cable television or a computer, but I had a record player in my room and a tape deck in the Oldsmobile. The only way to get my cheap musical thrills came through these jukeboxes.

The same man who never made money from these jukeboxes poured coins into the palm of my hand. Just one quarter afforded me three songs. With plenty of coins saved up in my Rainbow Brite change purse, I became the resident DJ at Athens Diner.

Sometimes, if we visited the diner just after lunch rush, I’d have a good 30 minutes to an hour with the place to myself. Debbie Gibson, Tiffany and Whitney Houston frequently joined my DJ set for a very enthusiastic dance party. If customers packed the premises, I would opt for crowd pleasers, something more vintage, say Wham! or Tina Turner or Kool & the Gang.

My mother, Lisa, remembers what actually got the customers tapping their toes.

“You’ve gotta remember, this was New Jersey,” she tells me recently. “So we would get a lot of Bon Jovi.”

Mom grew up in Newark in the Motown era of the 1960s and ’70s. At home, especially while cooking, she spun Four Tops and Temptations on vinyl. Later, as both my younger sister and I got a little older, she’d rest a saucy wooden spoon on the stovetop to grab our hands, whirling us through a proper lesson on disco dancing to the hustle. Following the synthesized bells of Donna Summer, we’d get the rocking and crooning of Elton John. “The Bitch Is Back” became our anthem, but we’d settle for “Crocodile Rock” at the diner.

We moved to North Carolina the summer before I turned 8. In the years to come, we’d frequently drive 10 hours to visit my grandparents in New Jersey, this time in a Dodge Caravan. Our first stop: Athens Diner. No matter how much we may have argued over music on the ride up, my parents, sister and I could slither into a booth and find our tune.

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.