It must be this cold weather that’s been making me crave a good bowl of Har Mee (Prawn noodle soup), but for the past couple of years I haven’t been able to find a decent bowl. The best in Sydney was ‘the dungeon’ (as we called it) on Castleraegh Street, but ever since it closed about 4 years ago I’ve been left stranded (and hungry).

When Vick introduced me to To’s Malaysian Gourmet in North Sydney I knew the drought was over, though my laziness to walk to North Sydney does prevent me from time to time. I really should make the trip to North Sydney more often, their Har Mee is awesome! And when you order take-away you get 2 bowls! Yum yum. Though the only problem with eating at your desk is that you’re left with orange spots all over your screen and keyboard. Oh well, it’s worth it!

No one cooks better than my Grandma, seriously. I don’t care how many awards you’ve won or how many hats you have, my grandma’s cooking tops them all. And if you’ve ever eaten her Asam Laksa, you’d know what I mean. Asam Laksa is slightly different from your usual creamy laksa, it’s more of a fishy sour laksa. Probably doesn’t sound too nice from that description, but trust me – it’s amazing!

She only really cooks Asam Laksa once a year for my cousins birthday, so when she does I try fit as much of it in as physically possible; I even skipped lunch to make sure I could eat more. The only problem this year was she’d also cooked an awesome dessert, one that she hasn’t cooked in nearly 20 years: Bubur Cha Cha (Funny name, great dish). As soon as I saw all the pretty colours on the kitchen counter I knew we were in for a treat.

Different families have their own version of Bubur cha cha and none is more right than the other. My grandma’s version has sago (the coloured balls), yam, sweet potato and banana all cooked together in a pandan coconut soup. Once the sago is cooked the colours are super bright.

I felt like such a big kid watching my grandma cook it. I was literally jumping up and down singing “Bubur cha cha, bubur cha cha”. Here’s the finish product, served nice and hot. Perfect for winter.

My grandma is so sweet, she only cooked it because I saw it on a menu the other day and got excited. I didn’t ask her to cook it, in fact I didn’t even know she was cooking it till I got there. Just as well a prerequisite for going to my grandma’s house is a big appetite. YUM!

Nothing beats grandma’s cooking.

Esta’s recently moved in with some of her mates in Byron and the house is filled with dogs. The house holds 4 people and 4 dogs. As crazy as it is with 4 dogs, it’s a heck of a lot of fun, especially when there’s always such happy faces to greet you.

Just like me, the dogs love the beach. I was able to capture this fleeting moment of stillness before we unleashed the craziness of sand, waves, water, various treasures along the beach and a lot of “Sunshine / Dooby NO! Come here!”

Sunshine the doggy pinup?

Seriously, who can say no to these puppy dog eyes?

It’s been about 3 weeks since I’ve been home and boy have I missed it! I love coming home to a delicious home cooked meal, especially when my G’ma is around. Tonight she cooked a mean chilli crab for dinner. Yum! To go with my meal I went to grab a drink from the bar fridge in my room and found a nice surprise. Looks like the fridge got to the Coke before I did. It’s probably better that way – Coke’s not good for you anyway.

Getting festival tickets is always a stressful event, but with Splendour in the Grass it took it to a whole new level. Tickets were due to come out at 9am so I logged on at about 8.50. Already the server was busy (as expected) but after a few refreshes I managed to log on to the moshtix page and join the queue. I was 13,313 in the queue. After about 20 minutes in the queue I made it up to the 4,000 mark, then disaster strikes.

Fricken bleep bleep!

So I hit ‘back’ and try again. I’m all the way at the end of the queue this time around the 21,000 mark! Thinking I wasn’t going to get tickets I left the page going in the background and again I get the error page – 3 more times! After what felt like the 10th time I finally make it to the booking page. I enter my email address and password, hit send and then… You guess it, disaster strikes again.

I hit ‘back’ and again I’m in the queue, I think I was around the 16,000 mark. After a few more visits to the error page I make it to the booking page, again I enter my email address and password and hit send (with my fingers crossed). Success I make it to the next page, I fill that page out and hit send (without crossing my fingers) and…

W..T..F..!

By this stage I’m about to give up but I thought I’d give it one more shot. This time (after the many error messages) I make it to the page where I enter my credit card details – the final stage. I enter my details and hit process.

You’ve got to be fricken kidding me!

I didn’t know what to do. I had just entered in my credit card details and didn’t want to hit refresh in case my credit card gets charged twice. Stuff it, I hit refresh and cross my fingers. The page sat there for a good 10 minutes just thinking … thinking … thinking, then finally.

SUCCESS! I couldn’t believe my eyes. It actually worked! And gee it only took 1 and a half hours.

Anyway, looks like I’m going to Splendour! Yipee..!

Byron really is my favourite place in the world and one day I will call it home (hopefully one day soon aye?). Whenever we’re in Byron we always to go Belongi. It’s an awesome place for fishing and a great place to take some snaps.

Another place we’ve been to time and time again is the tea tree lake. We didn’t have enough time to take a dip on this trip, but we managed to get a few happy snaps.

I love the reflection in the water. Because the water is so dark it’s almost like a mirror.

More picture from the trip are on my flickr page.

I’ve had a DSLR for a while now but I rarely use it, it’s too big to bring everywhere. But since we took my car on our latest trip to Byron, luggage weight and size wasn’t a problem. I still don’t really know how to use it properly, but hey, practice makes perfect right? And what better place to practice than the most beautiful place in the world: Byron Bay. That’s pretty much all we did in Byron, take photos. I’ll upload some more photo in the next post, but in this post I want to introduce 2 friends.

First up is our little friend squash. He came with us everywhere we went, not by choice though.

Next is Bella, who would also go everywhere you went, but by choice.

I love Bella. She’s so sweet and polite (look at how she crosses her back legs). Aww Bella…

I’m back! I was in Ballina / Byron last week hanging out with mates, going fishing, op-shopping and just taking some time to relax. Sorry about the lack of posts. I’ll be uploading pics over the next couple of days from the trip.

First up, the BBQ boat.

I absolutely love fishing, but hate it when I don’t catch anything. Unfortunately it was one of those days. The only fish I caught wasn’t even mine, it was on G’s rod and she asked me to reel it in for her. Chris on the other hand was in luck catching his first ever fish.

Since it was the first catch of the day we threw it back for good luck. None of that good luck came to me, I didn’t even get a nibble! I think all of that good luck went to G who reeled in 2 nice bream one right after the other.

Check out the bait we used, live worms. Was really odd trying to hook your bait when it’s still moving and squiggling.

I’ve never been to a musical before but I’ve always loved watching musicals on screen, and yes I must admit – like my 8 year old cousin – I love High School Musical.

Before the show we swung by Yumei for a quick feed. It was seafood on seafood followed by more seafood. Can you tell we ate a lot of seafood?

Wicked was totally awesome. Are all musicals that good? Seriously it was amazing, oh and it was kinda fun to see Bert Newton on stage. I love musicals! I thought the intermission was the end of the show and at that point would have already gone home one happy customer. What a noob.

At the intermission we picked up these wicked “love potion” slurpies. I felt really rude slurping it during the show but it’s not my fault, they didn’t give you one of those straws with a spoon at the end.

I love eating banana bread but hate paying for it. Seriously, $4 a slice is the biggest rip off, it cost less than $4 to make the entire loaf! To overcome this banana bread scandal, we decided to take matters into our own hands and make our own banana bread. Take that expensive cafe!

Well ours turned out looking more like a cake than bread because the bread tin didn’t fit in G’s oven, but it’s all in the taste right? And if I do say so myself, I think ours tastes pretty amazing. Banana and choc chip goodness. Yum!