On CNY my grandma pulled out a bunch of her old cookbooks which, much to my disappointment, were all written in Indonesian. Being the ABC (Australian Born Chinese) that I am, my knowledge (or lack thereof) of any language except English left me worried that I’d never again eat these Asian delights.

In fear of a life without authentic home-made Asian desserts I asked my Grandma to teach me how to make some. The first on the list was Onde-Onde: sweet potato glutinous rice balls covered in coconut with palm sugar (Gula Melaka) inside.

It’s been years since my grandma’s made these and after giving it a shot, I can see why. Unlike cakes where you just chuck all the ingredients in a bowl, mix and bake; Onde-Onde involves kneading, rolling, balling, boiling and then rolling again.

The balls are mostly just glutinous rice flour, sweet potato and pandan juice. After kneading it to the right consistency (under the strict direction of the Masterchef) you roll it out and cut them in the small bits.

Each bit is then filled with palm sugar.

Then rolled into balls and ready to boil.

Once they’re boiled they’re rolled in fresh coconut shavings and you’re done.

The recipe isn’t exactly hard, it just takes a lot of time considering each ball is made individually. But it’s so worth it. As soon as I popped one into my mouth and the palm sugar came oozing out … drool …  I’d died and gone to heaven – kuih heaven.

Whoever first thought of serving coffee in a soup bowl is genius, perhaps a crazy caffeine-addicted genius but a genius nonetheless. I must admit I struggled with my coffee, I’d nearly finished my bowl when I realised my hands were shaking so I thought it best to resign and admit defeat. Should have waved the white flag earlier, I was up half the night buzzing.

The corn fritters are a must. I was so into my corn fritters I’d forgotten I about the pile of bacon on the plate.

After stuffing ourselves silly we ventured down the road to score another 2-for-1 deal at Cold Rock Ice Creamery. Being in the mood for something different I decided to make up a new mix: Mango Yoghurt ice-cream with Bounty mix in. Strange, but it was actually really nice. I guess a better indicator of taste would be: Would I order it again? Sure would.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the 2010 Good Vibrations line up: Salt-N-Pepa, Naughty by Nature, Busta Rhymes and – one of my favourites – The Killers.

We went to the Gold Coast GV which held a few pros and cons over the Sydney GV. The biggest pro was The Killers, who unfortunately pull out of the Sydney GV but made it to the Gold Coast.

Another pro was the layout, it’s a much smaller venue compared to Sydney making it easy to get around from stage to stage. Also, the main stage is at the bottom of a slope – making it easy to see over the sea of heads (especially with your slightly shorter friends).

The only crappy thing was the line to get in. Getting burnt shoulders while in a stinking hot queue for 45 minutes wasn’t a great start to the day. And to add to it there were groups of people with the “Oh, I’m trying to find my friend” excuse. Gr..

Once we were in it was all good. The day had a strong old school vibe with a heap of tracks whipped straight out of the 80s and 90s. I never thought I’d ever see Salt-N-Pepa live but I did, and they were awesome. They played all their top hits like Push it, Let’s talk about Sex, Whatta man, Shoop, and a killer mix of 90s classics.

Naughty by Nature went off! Everyone in the tent was bopping to the beat and singing “Hay – Ho – Hay – Ho”. They really know how to work the crowd. As you can see from the photo below, I didn’t dare venture inside the sweat infested tent. That’s the closest I could go without passing out from the aroma.

After a refreshing 2 minute storm to cool us down, we were all set for The Killers to take the stage. In one word, they were amazing! Brandon (the lead singer) has such an amazing voice that carried through all the high and low notes and remained constant right to the very end. Amazing.

After a long day at GV it was nice to have the next day to rest and relax by the ocean. This was the view from our apartment.

Beautiful. Funny thing is we never actually went in the water, we just enjoyed the view of it from our apartment.

I think we’re getting old!

Most days were filled with fishing, or should I say “trying to fish”. We never actually caught anything big enough to take home but it was fun nevertheless. Perhaps one of the strangest things was when G pulled in this bizarre looking … fish? I’m not even sure if you would call it a fish.

It was so slimy that you can see our reflection in the top left shot. Gross. We were more than happy to toss that one back in the water.

You can’t actually see it in this picture, but for some strange reason there were heaps of fish gliding across the waves only metres from the shore. It looked like the fish were surfing and catching waves, which kind of made me jealous cause it looked like so much fun. I’ve never seen fish surf before, there must’ve been something in the water.

Other days were spent eating and Op-shopping. I think we went a little crazy on the books: 7 Vogue Entertaining magazines and 3 vintage copies of Jane Eyre. Lugging them home was my least favourite part of the trip.

On the flip side, one of the funniest things was waking up to this one morning:

And then this the following morning:

The poor puppies look so tired after shredding the futon to bits. Luckily they left just enough mess to be comfortable.

After a few nights in Byron we headed back up to the Gold Coast for more R and R at Q1 Resort and Spa – the world’s tallest residential building. Just looking up at the building made me dizzy.

With ‘Shire people’ never leaving The Shire, we all made the long voyage down to there to celebrate Nga’s Birthday. It was Opah restaurant for a Greek banquet where I had to make sure I paced myself or suffer the consequences of being too full for cake – the surprise Cold Rock ice cream cake. This cake was a killer with 3 different layers of ice cream goodness:

The first layer: Cookies and cream ice-cream with Maltesers
The second layer: Vanilla ice-cream with gummi bears (Nga’s favourite, though most of us ended up spitting out the gummi bears)
The third layer was: Ferrero Rocher ice-cream with nuts and Nutella.

Drool… It really was an awesome cake and I think a new standard for birthdays to come. Agata – you’re next!

I don’t know if it was because we were in The Shire but it seriously did not stop raining! Even the simple task of walking across the road from the restaurant to Northies (or the RSL as Jenny would call it) required a lot of persuasion, and we’re usually not one to need a lot of persuasion when there’s alcohol. Speaking of alcohol, I think the birthday girl had a bit too much.

Happy Birthday Nga!

I headed to Etch Restaurant for a catch up dinner with some of the girls from uni, I haven’t seen some of them in years so it was a long over due dinner. Every time we meet up we know we’re in for a good laugh, and a stomach work out because we usually end up doubled-over on the floor clutching our stomach with tears in our eyes from laughing too much. Dinner, even though at a fancy restaurant, was no different. We were laughing so hard we had tears in our eyes, were probably the loudest table there and I’m pretty sure the staff at the restaurant were having a good laugh at us too.

If you go to Etch I would highly recommend the degustation menu – it was frickin awesome! And at $85, it’s a bargain.
Here are the pics (sorry they aren’t great, no flash and no tripod = noisy photos that just don’t do the food justice):

Marinated Hiramasa kingfish, avocado, wasabi mayonnaise and burnt lime.
What a stunning opener.

Pan roasted Queensland scallops, cauliflower puree, bhaji, curry oil
Yum and yum with yum spread on the plate. Can you tell I’m liking the food so far?

Local sea bream, crumbed scampi, blood orange, confit fennel
The bream was so soft it fell apart in your mouth.

Crispy spiced duck, watermelon, cucumber, black bean vinaigrette
This was one of my favourites for the night. Who would have thought duck and watermelon go so well together.

6 hour braised beef cheek, spinach puree, Madeira consommé
The duck was a tough dish to follow so I didn’t highly rate this dish. The beef was really soft and fell apart on your plate, but I think I was still dreaming about the duck.

Pre-dessert
Sorry I forgot what this was and it’s not on their website, all I remember is that there’s sorbet and grapefruit and it was delicious. Oh and the pale orange looking blob wobbles.

Caramel date tart, burnt butter ice cream, Earl Grey tea syrup
O.M.F.G! This tart is THE BEST TART I’VE EVER HAD. No joke. Everyone at our table was so impressed, and everyone not at our table was jealous. No doubt there were some tables pointing and saying “I’ll have what she’s having”. I seriously had to restrain myself from picking up the plate and licking it clean.

Etch lolly tray
This isn’t part of the degustation, we ordered this separately. Right to left: Coconut cigars with sherbet, dark chocolate slice, pistachio lolly, and mint ice-cream dipped in white chocolate. The cigar and the ice cream were my favourite from the plate. The dark chocolate slice, which I mistakenly left till last wasn’t my cup of tea but if you like dark chocolate you’ll love it. I took a bite and wanted to spit it out, leaving me with a not so nice last taste in my mouth. To make up for that yukky last taste I snorted, I mean licked some sherbet.

We got a new HD flip video at the office. I love it, it’s so teeny tiny. Don’t worry I’m not going to start video blogging or anything like that, I hate being in front of the camera. But I’ll try bring it to Good Vibes to record all the old school acts like Salt-n-Pepa and Naughty by Nature. Still can’t believe the strange line up.

I’ve wanted to try this place for a while now, I’ve walked past a couple of times and it always looked like a lot of fun. As you can see from the picture above, there’s no shortage of alcohol, in fact the drinks menu had 4 pages solely dedicated to tequila. Being my birthday dinner I was a bit scared of those 4-pages.

Because we had a big group we went with the set menu, just makes life so much easier. Here’s the run down:

The first entree was corn fritters, now I always thought corn fritters were flat pancake looking things, I guess they’re round in Mexico. Whatever the shape or size I don’t really care, they were so good and a great was to start the meal.

Next up was a dish called ‘Queso Fundido’ where you make tortillas packed with chorizo, tomatoes, olives and hot peppers. I think the fun in ‘fundido’ comes from the spicy kick at the end, which then leads to the consumption of a lot of mojito. And I don’t usually like mojitos, but this mojito was really nice, so nice that I didn’t even want to sample their extensive range of Mexican beers.

The third and final entree were these corn-chip pizza looking things topped with chicken and – everyone’s favourite – refried beans (Note the hint sarcasm).

By now we were stuffed and the main hadn’t even arrived. Nevertheless we tried our best to eat as many fajitas as possible but to be honest we barely made a dent, even the boys had to admit defeat.

After stuffing ourselves silly, we moved to the bar for a round of tequila. Just one round because like most people, we’re scared of tequila. We ordered the “Tequila of the week” because to us, tequila is tequila. You should have seen the look of absolute horror on our faces when the bartender poured the tequila, the smell of it burnt my nostril hairs and almost sent me running. And instead of the usual lick-sip-suck, we were given the tequila shot and red shot as the chaser. I was scared.

3, 2, 1, shot, shot.

Much to my surprise it was quite nice. I was expecting this nail polish remover type burn, but was pleasantly surprised with a nice smooth slightly warm sensation down my throat, followed by a Bloody Mary type chaser. Yum. I think I could grow to like tequila.

The night progressed to bar hopping on Oxford Street to places that for some reason, lacked sufficient A/C. After sweating it out we decided to call it a night.

I love birthdays. Great food, great friends and memento Sombrero Hats – that’s what it’s all about. Thanks for the presents guys! You know me too well – cooking and beaching. And did I mention the awesome sombrero hat?

Anna kept calling me a nerd for laminating the set times and map but by the end of the day I think I convinced her that nerd are cool. Our copy of the set times was indestructible. Nerd 1 : Anna 0.

Now we originally had tickets to the Saturday show, but managed to swap over to the Friday show which worked out perfectly considering the crazy weather on Saturday where the temperature in the late afternoon dropped a whopping 15 degrees in just 1 hour. I reckon a lot of people attending the Saturday show would have gotten sick. The Friday show was great, yes the weather at the start of the day was a killer with temperatures rising as high as 40 degrees, but it did cool down a tiny bit in the afternoon.

When we first got in the heat unbearable, we were dripping with sweat and hadn’t even gone to see anyone yet. I really wanted to see Kasabian fittingly sing “I’m on fiiiiire…” but we seriously couldn’t bear the heat.

One of the highlights of the day was the set by Girl Talk. Known for his mashups, Girl Talk mixed an assortment sweet tracks ranging from The Chilli Peppers to Jackson 5, Crowded House to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, some old school RnB and he even managed to squeeze in some Kelly Clarkson. Random, but oh so fun.

After Girl Talk in the Boiler room we were so hot so we stopped by the Olympic flame for a much needed cool down. After that it was go go go where we raced from stage to stage to check out the major acts.

Dizzee Rascal was … BONKERS! He drew such a massive crowd and it was going absolutely crazy, it was a very impressive sight especially in the heat. You really couldn’t sit still during his set, you had to dance or at the very least bop your head … and then be dripping with sweat. Oh well, the music was just too good to care.

Lily Allen was up next, I was a bit skeptical about how her voice would carry at the main stage but she was great. She looked and sounded gorgeous. It’s a bit of a shame that she’s not going to continue performing but I’m glad I had the chance to see her live in action and really working the stage.

Jet, as always, were great. Calvin Harris made everyone dance their feet off. And Ladyhawke played with everyone’s delirium on her guitar with her Kiwi accent. It was a jam packed afternoon with so much to do and see, but there was still plenty more to come.

OMG Muse were amazing! When they came on stage all feelings of tiredness and exhaustion seem to disappear with the heavy sound of the drums and guitar. They really know how to captivate an audience, no matter how tired you are. It was amazing to experience Starlight live, I say ‘experience’ because it wasn’t just in the sound; it incorporated all your sense (well all except for maybe taste, you couldn’t really taste the song, but if you could I reckon it would taste pretty sweet). I’d fallen in love with this song over the past couple of months and I got the chills when they started to play the intro.

After that we quickly rushed to Boiler room to see Groove Armada. I have a much greater appreciation of Groove Armada now that I’ve seen them live. A lot of effort goes into their show and the vocals and the band are really talented. It was a great way to end the night Superstylin’.

I know I sound a bit like a raving lunatic but I really did have a great time. I think BDO is my new favourite festival. Can’t wait till BDO 2011.