Kristy and I had such a good time at the Grass Tree Kitchen cooking school that we came up with the bright idea of getting a gift voucher for Mom for her birthday last year. Genius! Mom was equally impressed since she’s a big fan of Dominique Rizzo, who is listed as one of their resident chefs – so taking a class with her sounded like it was right up Mom’s ally!

Unfortunately, every time we tried to find a class with Dominique, we came up disappointed – none were ever listed, no matter how far in advance we looked! As it turns out, she’s now too expensive for the school, so she no longer teaches there; despite this fact, she remains listed as the number one resident chef on their webpage, which I personally think is a little shady. We probably wouldn’t have bought a gift voucher for Mom had we have known we wouldn’t be able to take a class with Dominique.

Anyway – what’s done is done – we had a gift voucher to be used, and so we booked in for the Chinese peasant class with one of the other chefs – Tony Ching:

This class shares my Chinese heritage with dishes perfect for the busy, time short family. My mums fantastic food – simple, cheap, fast, healthy and very tasty.

Tasty, indeed! We cooked three dishes – rice with chinese sausage, beef and black bean, and sesame pork. None of the dishes were ground-breaking; but I was more interested in the techniques and tid-bits of information that Tony shared. Here’s a few of the said tid-bits – note, this is what we were taught on the course, not (necessarily) my own opinions:

• Pork is the safest of all meats, and pork fat helps to break down the “bad” fats in your body. Tony even went so far as to eat (a small quantity of) raw pork mince in front of us in order to test if it was adequately seasoned.
• Recommended brands to buy are: Lee Kum Kee for stock, Shao Hsing for cooking wine, and Kikkoman for soy sauce. Avoid Chinese brands of soy sauce (e.g. Pearl River) as they’re often padded out with crushed human hair, which makes them cheaper to produce, while still meeting the minimum requirement for protein quantity.
• Buy garlic from Australia; avoid garlic from China (often grown in human feces) and Mexico (where they still use DDT)

Overall, both Mom and I enjoyed the course; we both learned a few things, Tony was a great chef, and the food was delicious.

This weekend, we’ve been lucky enough to share both of our breakfasts with friends! On Saturday, Joe, Shamine and Harry came to our place, and we devoured some breakfast burritos. Note for next time: refried beans taste fantastic with scrambled eggs! We tired the kids out with some bubble-fun and activity table time in the backyard afterwards.

Today, it was back to Willow & Spoon, this time with Laura and Tim, Bill, Inge, and Monique! Once again, deciding what to order was a task in itself, but I eventually settled on The Harlequin – Smoked Cod, brioche, avocado, tomato & green onion salsa, artichoke, veloute. Of course, I had no idea what that translated to, but I was pleasantly surprised when it came out looking like this:

Delicious! And, it was great to see so many Foleys again; we hadn’t seen Monique since shortly after she was born!

• Photos from breakfast with Joe, Shamine and Harry on Google+ and Facebook
• Photos from Willow & Spoon with the Foleys on Google+ and Facebook

Cousin Laura was the first one to tell us about Willow & Spoon; or at least, it was the first time I remember anyone telling us about it. That’s not to say we hadn’t heard about it before – on the contrary, it’s scary how quickly I forget things these days. Like, where was I going with this… ?

Oh! Right. Willow & Spoon! As I was saying, Laura told us about this little gem of a cafe in Alderley, promising “amazing food” and a “gigantic backyard”. And she delivered on both of her promises! Their brunch menu was unlike anything I’ve seen before – to the point where they bring you a separate menu which explains what on earth all the options are. And, it changes monthly! How exciting!

The only downfall I could see was that the menu looked too good – picking just one thing was quite a challenge! But in the end, both Kristy and I couldn’t go past the “Voodoo Chicken”, which is briefly described as “Southern Fried Cajun Chicken, ‘creole’ baked beans, poached egg & ‘Papa Ghede’ salsa. A picture paints a thousand words, so:

Ohh, that salsa was spicy! Lea and Dean joined us for our Sunday brunch escapade, and between them they managed to pick two different meals: Dean had “The Diabolical Pact” (Banana, date & rosted green chilli loaf, kalamanta labna, ricotta, confit pineapple), and Lea went for the “Sleeping Beauty” (Poached Eggs, mushroom & tarragon ‘muffin’, tomato-honey, garden pea sauce). Both meals looked equally impressive as the voodoo chicken, and both Lea and Dean were happy customers!

So yes, I would highly recommend Willow & Spoon for your next brunch outing – though, given that it was recommended by Laura, I was pretty confident that it was going to be good before I even knew what it was. Yum!

As mentioned in our last visit to Settlement Cove, we were so impressed by the location and the facilities that we booked the same gang for a follow-up visit! Today though, we decided to go for breakfast, in an attempt to beat the crowds and the heat of the day. It was a total success! The lagoon was much quieter upon arrival; we even managed to secure a covered gazebo with tables and chairs for our visit.

The other advantage of breakfast is that eggs and bacon are much quicker to cook compared to sausages and burgers, so the sub-par heat from the BBQs wasn’t as much of a problem. And the bacon and egg rolls that we enjoyed afterwards were delicious! A big thanks to chef Stu who did a pearler of a job with all the cooking!

Once again, the kids had a great time running amok through the lagoons and the playground, while the parents supervised and chatted.

What a wonderful way to start the weekend!

More albums on the gallery page, Google+, or Facebook.

I’m not having any luck with commuting to work at the moment.

Fresh off the back of my scooter battery blowing up, this morning, my bike chain came off as I was down-shifting while riding up a (very steep) hill. No biggie – unfortunately, the chain coming off isn’t exactly a rarity – but this time it was so tightly wedged between the crank and the frame that I couldn’t get it out!

I tried for about 10 minutes to get it unstuck before giving up and wheeling the bike home, hands completely blackened from grease. Suffice to say I was in rather a foul mood by the time I got home; there was much cursing and yelling, and threats such as “I’ll never ride this stupid bike again!”, etc etc.

Sometime later and I’m a little bit calmer, though still underimpressed at how many problems I’ve had with the bike. I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with it – nothing that has happened is out of the ordinary – I just think I’m having a run of bad luck. Oh well – I’ll pull the chain off tonight and give it all a clean plus a fresh coat of grease; hopefully that’ll solve the issue and I’ll be back on board tomorrow.

The fuel light had been solid on my scooter for a few days, so this morning I finally relented and pulled over at BP at Bowen Hills to fill it up. 5.76 litres later (which averages at 23.47 km/l in case you’re curious) and I was all ready to finish the commute to work.

That is, until something went POP!

It was ridiculously loud; so loud that I was convinced that one of my tires had blown when I demounted the scooter from its stand. Given the recent run of flat tires I’ve had on my bike, it certainly would have been fitting! But no, that wasn’t the problem – both tires were intact. Instead, the scooter’s electrics had gone completely dark! And, given that it has an electric starter motor, that meant that the scooter wasn’t going anywhere!

Thankfully, the lady working at BP – Carol – was very understanding about the whole situation, and she was happy for me to leave the scooter there until I could figure out how to move it. As soon as the scooter mechanics opened, I called them for some advice, and they told me how to check the battery terminals and the main fuse. Cam (from work) and I drove back to do this, and we both thought that everything looked as it should, which confirmed that the only way the scooter was going to leave the petrol station was via scooter taxi.

As it turns out, Motorcycle Freighters will transport your scooter from Bowen Hills to Fortitude Valley for $50.

In the end, the problem was one of the cells in the battery shorting. That means about as much to me as it does to you – unless you’re a mechanic of some sort, in which case it probably means a lot more to you than it does to me. Anyway, the cell shorting caused the lid of the battery to (literally) pop open, hence the noise that I heard. And the cure? A new battery, which set me back $88.

I can think of better things that I’d rather put $140 towards but I guess sometimes you don’t always get the choice!

It’s about time that Julian and Shelley paid a visit to Australia! We’ve missed them! So have a whole host of other people it would seem, judging by the throng of people that gathered to see them at Julian’s parent’s house out at DumbGumdale on Saturday! I counted at least 14 before losing interest in counting; likely it was because I was too busy chasing Oscar around their acres of yard space!

Anyway – this is certainly the first time that Julian and Shelley have been in the same country with us and the Threebies for aaaaaaages, so we had Shelley’s Dad – Peter – take a photo to commemorate the occasion.

Full compliments to Peter for producing what is easily one of the better framed photos of us that we have. His discomfort at using a superior brand of camera hardly shows in the photo at all! Yet, despite his photography skills, I once again find myself displeased with how my hair looks in this shot. After the disastrous photo at Mitchelton markets where my hair was clearly too long on top, now it’s so short that I look like a total chav! I warned the hairdresser that gauge six on top was far too optimistic, and this is what I get?!

From now on, I’ll be the guy wearing a hat.

We’ve been having some trouble with our media centre PC that I so proudly built only a few years ago. More pacifically – the computer refused to boot, and instead complained that it couldn’t find the hard drive which contained (amongst other things) the operating system and all program files.

Thankfully, we’re pretty diligent about backing things up, so I knew there wasn’t really anything on there that we couldn’t afford to lose. And, figuring that the best way of getting windows to run faster is to format your hard drive and install clean, that’s exactly what I attempted to do. It was a total failure! The computer still didn’t want to recognise the drive; at one point, it disappeared completely from the BIOS. I got in touch with OCZ support who gave me a number of things to try, but unfortunately none of them worked either.

It was looking suspiciously like I was going to have to send the drive back to OCZ for replacement. There was no way we could handle watching commercial TV for however long it was going to take for the drive to be replaced though, so I decided to do a “temporary install” of Windows on the media drive as an interim solution. Guess what? That failed too!

At this point, the only answer I had left was that we were suffering from total hardware failure, and its reach extended beyond the hard drive to somewhere around the MoBo, CPU, and RAM. And that only meant one thing – time for an upgrade! So, after a quick jaunt to UMart with Ben (where we were called some very rude things by a rather rude lady from the Entertainment Book company – but that’s a story for another time…), I came away with:

• MoBo: Gigabyte GA-A75M-D2H
• CPU: A triple-core AMD A6 3500, which draws only 65W under load!
• RAM: 8 GB of pimped out G.SKILL DDR3 PC-14900

Having spent a large portion of the weekend preparing the computer for an overhaul – thankfully with a second machine available for life support – it didn’t take long to perform the transplant operation on Monday night. Everything was back up and running by Tuesday morning! Unfortunately though, our troubles didn’t quite end there; whenever we tried to watch live TV, Windows Media Center reported:

Viewing or Listening Conflict – no tuner available to satisfy the current request.

Huh? A bit of googling around told me that I simply needed to install a certain Windows update and the problem would be solved – however when I ran the update, Windows told me that it didn’t apply to my PC! Finally, I eventually stumbled on to a post which had some sage-though-a-little-desperate sounding advice:

1. Open regedit
2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video
3. Delete the key named “Tuners”, then reboot the PC
4. Start Windows Media Centre, and re-setup the TV Tuner card

Fumbing around in the registry is generally a very bad idea indeed, but at this point I was willing to try anything – and guess what? It worked!

Huzzah! We are back in the land of media centre, TV on demand, commercial free bliss!

Jason and I recently attended the Beer Academy on behalf of EatDrinkBrisbane; here’s the story that we wrote up to cover our day. You can find the original on the EDB website.

Gerrod: Think you know beer? Matt Kirkegaard certainly does, so he’s the perfect person to be launching Beer Academy in Australia. Beer Academy is a beer appreciation class which started in the UK in 2003. And now, it’s come to Australia – starting in Brisbane, no less! My brother Jason and I went along to a Wednesday lunch-time class to check it out, on behalf of Eat Drink Brisbane.

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It wasn’t long after I started riding to work that I decided I had done enough trips to justify a new set of wheels. I think I lasted maybe five journeys on my mountain bike before deciding that an upgrade was in order. Say hello to bike number two:

I believe this is classed as a “commuter” bike – similar to a road bike, but without the dropped handlebars. It’s wonderful! It’s a 2012 Merida Speeder T3, and you know that any bike whose model name contains the word “speed” has got to be fast. In fact, the first day I rode it home, my trip time was 25% faster than it was on my mountain bike!

To be fair, it’s not without its downsides – well, one downside anyway. The tires are much more prone to punctures than the mountain bike seemed to be. In the three months I’ve had the bike, riding on average one or two days per week (curse you, rain!), I’ve already had three punctures. Three! I never got a puncture on the mountain bike! But, I guess that’s the price you gotta pay for running your tires at a much higher pressure (100 psi versus 40-50)!

Anyway – it is overall a huge improvement for the commute to work, and I really enjoy riding it. And, I’m absolutely loving the selection of music that I have for my journey – basically I just put my phone on shuffle, and every song is a winner! Here’s my current playlist, for the curious:

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