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Monday, June 26, 2006
Breaking My Fast
At last an update, you exclaim! Why so long, you ask? Well, something must have been seriously wrong with me because save a bowl of porridge over the weekend, I pretty much did a 40 hour famine! I know! I voluntarily didn't eat! I must have been sick or crazy. I was in one of my fussy moods again. Nothing seemed good enough to eat. I even turned down pizza! I finally broke my fast yesterday at lunch. I met up with Ma on her lunch break. I ordered a spicy chicken panini and a hot chocolate. I also finally got to try biscotti. I picked chocolate and mixed nut flavour. It is was much more flavourful than I thought it would be. Sweet and crunchy. Might have to eat me some biscotti more often. Lunch seriously filled me up though. I guess it was like an overload to my stomach after being empty for so many hours. I thought I might explode. Eventually, I digested and dinner was made possible. I made a two very satisfying pesto and parmesan toasted sandwiches. I've decided parmesan is one of my favourite cheeses. It's nice and mild. I can even it it plain, which I don't normally do. It also goes in a lot of my favourite Italian dishes. It went perfectly with pesto because it didn't overpower it. I finished up my day with a caramel slice because y'know I needed to make up for my low calorie intake from the previous day. Well, it seemed as good an excuse as any.... It was really yummy, in case you were wondering. Muffin Break make the best caramel slices. But the ones at Botany seem to be the best. The other branches ones don't look as good. Of course, the best caramel slices are probably home made but I lost my recipe. I got happy memories of Alana and I making 'em though. Mmmm... caramel... and chocolate... and biscuit. A good combo.

I'm rambling lots today. Anticipate lots of food porn coming soon though because today is Dad's birthday and there were rumours of a cake being made. Tomorrow we are going out to Thai for dinner. Then on Wednesday I am eating lunch with Jenny. I'm thinking Japanese for that but we'll see. It'll be a good fooding week, I expect. My tummy is excited.

I apologise for the lack of pictures. I wanted to upload a picture of the biscotti but Blogger wouldn't let me.

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posted by Lauren @ 2:15 PM   0 comments
Monday, June 19, 2006
Baby Food Sammich
Inspired by Elvis' much loved grilled peanut butter and banana sandwich, I decided to make my own for lunch. I didn't have a recipe so I made it up. Slight modifications will be made if I ever make this again. Unlike Elvis, I mashed my banana and I probably used less peanut butter. I also added some caramel sauce. I didn't fry it in a pan like most recipes of the famous sandwich call for. I used a toasted sandwich maker instead. How did it turn out? Well, it kinda looked like a sandwich stuffed with baby food. haha. The banana was extremely gooey. Methinks I should just chop the banana next time. It probably could have done with less banana and more peanut butter. I really couldn't taste the caramel at all because I didn't put much on it. I bet this recipe would be quite tasty with some jam. Maybe I'll try that next time. Either way, it was an interesting experience. I will dub this version the Baby Food Sammich (mispelling intentional).

I realise this picture sucks but I was feeling to lazy to adequately document the experience.

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posted by Lauren @ 1:42 PM   0 comments
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Food Inferiority And My Growing Snobbery
You know what I hate, other than when I screw up my Startmenu toolbar so it is displayed vertically rather than horizontally and I can't remember how to fix it. I don't like being disappointed, especially by food. Sometimes you eat something that you think will be amazing, but after eating you think "That really wasn't worth it." The amount of calories you consume just isn't worth it. So many foods are just so-so. I'm sure my tastes are changing. I'm becoming a little bit snobbish in what I pick nowadays. I'm prone to claiming many foods inferior due to their quality of ingredients. Anything chocolate flavoured should be primarily made of chocolate, for example. Twenty other ingredients should not come before it on the label. Much of the food I ingested today was a disappointment, but I guess I brought that upon myself, denying my pancake eating instincts for mock-Chinese food. I went with my father to see how much I could cram into a large polystyrene container. Reason would suggest that you should just pick either a)noodles or b)rice with maybe one or two other dishes. Unfortunately, when faced with a myriad of different foods in a smorgasbord array gluttony takes over and you just have to stuff as much as you can into your box. The results are yes, edible and sure, quite tasty but the flavours all mix together and your left with rather a confused mish-mash of pseudo-Asian food. I think the addition of the lemon chicken was rather a foolish one because it infected everything on the left side with a lemon taste that I didn't enjoy too much. Alas, I was curious to see what lemon chicken tasted like. If you're wondering. Chicken in a lemon sauce. Yeah, so exciting. Next to the lemon chicken I also shoved rice, noodles, a springroll, sweet n sour pork, BBQ pork, 5 spices chicken, a deep fried squid, some kind of beef, egg foo yeung (sp?) and maybe other random things. That's one of the problems with buffets. The individual tastes of a dish gets lost among the others. You force so much upon your taste buds at once that you're brain just can't compute them all. I wasn't exactly expecting gourmet cuisine from a foodcourt, but I think I'm over takeaway Asian. It's just not worth it. I've decided I'm going to make a list of things worth eating and things not worth eating. That way, I can avoid eating underwhelming foodstuffs from this point onwards (save new things I try). Life is too short and my waist line is too fragile to waste my time on inferior foods.

The moral of the story is... when in doubt, always make pancakes for dinner. You will never be let down by the awesomeness that is a pancake.

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posted by Lauren @ 9:19 PM   0 comments
Friday, June 16, 2006
Breakfast Is The Best Meal
... even at dinner time. I never dreamed that I would find a good enough replacement for my cereal, but not only did I find a breakfast food good enough, I found something amazing. Really. I love my oatmeal. I love it. It's so tasty and comforting. I mix one of my other favourite substances with it - maple syrup. This transforms it into a deliciously nutty maple delight. The taste very much resembles a Starbucks maple walnut scone, only in a less solid form. Did I mention it also smells delicious? I ate it twice today, for brunch and a second dinner. Yeah, I had a second dinner. The first dinner (inari sushi and some surimi) wasn't filling enough, so I had to eat a second dinner. I never knew I'd find love so soon.

I know it looks like goo but I promise it is supremely yummy.

Oooh, I had my first proper bowl of udon this week. Ma and I stopped into 277 while my dad was getting his surgery and I got teriyaki chicken udon. So much better than the udon I made, which probably barely even qualified as udon because it wasn't in broth, it was in a bowl of miso soup. It was tasty and slurpy (though I tried not to slurp too much because Aucklanders don't really dig that thing so much). I couldn't get a picture though because I forgot to put my XD card in my camera. Next time.

Oh yes and here is a picture of the delicious inari sushi that is now making friends with the oatmeal in my belly.

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posted by Lauren @ 6:35 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
And You Thought They'd Thought Of Everything...
This was just too good not to post! In Taiwan there is a restaurant with a toilet bowl theme! Not only do you sit on a toilet but you eat out of a (mini) toilet! They also feed you stuff that can look a lot like, well, y'know.... So gross, but so funny. Let's just hope they don't go a step further and actually make the toilets operational. Ewww....

I'm so eating there if I'm ever in that city!

Here are some links to articles and pictures from Usa Today and MSNBC. The mere text is gross enough, I don't want to spoil my blog with actual pictures of the oddity. Enjoy!
posted by Lauren @ 9:40 PM   0 comments
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Spaghetti Alla Carbonara
Mmmhmm tonight's dinner was good. Unfortunately, not enough for seconds. Just as well cuz I would have had alot and I am trying to cut down here. It's probably the hardest Italian dish to screw up actually. Pretty simple but so tasty. It had just the right amount of cheese flavour, wasn't too eggy and the bacon flavour didn't overpower. All the ingredients seemed to be in perfect harmony. I am turning into quite a good cook.



Here's the recipe...


SPAGHETTI WITH EGGS AND BACON (SPAGHETTI ALLA CARBONARA)

Ingredients
2 tbsp olive oil
150g bacon, cut into matchsticks
1 clove garlic, crushed
400g spaghetti
3 eggs, at room temperature
75g freshly grated Parmesan cheese
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Serves 4

1/ Bring a large pot of water to the boil. In a medium frying pan, heat the oil and saute the bacon and the garlic until the bacon renders its fat and starts to brown. Remove and discard the garlic (I couldn't be bothered doing this but you really couldn't notice the garlic). Keep the bacon and its fat hot until needed.
2/ Add salt and the spaghetti to the boiling water, and cook until al dente.
3/ While the pasta is cooking, warm a large serving bowl and break the eggs into it. I actually used the pot the spaghetti cooked in. Beat in the Parmesan cheese with a fork, and season with salt and pepper.
4/ As soon as the pasta is done, drain it quickly, and mix it into the egg mixture. Pour on the hot bacon and its fat. Stir well. The heat from the pasta and bacon fat will cook the eggs. Serve immediately.

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posted by Lauren @ 6:26 PM   0 comments
Monday, June 12, 2006
Pimp Your Cereal AND Your Snack
I heard about the coolest restaurant today. Cereality Cereal Bar and Cafe! They have all these different kinds of cereal and you can choose a bunch and combine them with different kinds of milk. So awesome. I can't believe no one ever though of that before.

I also discovered Pimp That Snack which is definitely worth a look. They take your favourite snacks and pimp em up giant size. It's gotten enough attention that Viacom, who have 'Pimp My Ride' and 'Pimp My' trademarked forced them to chance their name. My favourites are the giant Oreo, Kit Kat, Creme Egg and Lindt Lindor Ball. It almost makes me want to attempt my own pimped out snack creation.


Tonight we had stuffed roast beef. I didn't know you could stuff roast beef so I really learnt something today. We had yummy roasted potato and kumara with herbs. I declined to eat any mixed vegies, apart from two (a piece of carrot and corn) which somehow found its way to my plate. Vegetables should never come from a frozen form. It is wrong. The fridge is as far as the refridgeration process should go. Besides I don't like em cut into little pieces like that. I don't know, it's like unnecessary processing. It's cut up into small little pieces of carrot, corn and peas (well peas are small anyway, but I'm not a fan of them) like I can't chew my own food. It's both boring and insulting. I have tastebuds and teeth, yo.

I followed up my dinner with pudding in a teacup. It's a delicacy I invented. All the cool kids are doing it. It means you eat less, but it seems like your eating more.
posted by Lauren @ 7:01 PM   1 comments
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Chicken Pesto Spaghetti ala Lauren
Faced with a dying basil plant, I just had to make something with a pesto sauce tonight. Basil is such a yummy smell, I would have liked to enjoy its fragrance awhile longer but no, it was to become a pasta sauce. I had intended to follow a traditional recipe for pesto sauce but found I did not have enough basil for this. Inspired and growing more confident in my cooking skills by the day, I aspired to create my own pesto sauce. I'm not even sure of the quantities of ingredients I put in it because I was constantly tweeking it but it contained basil leaves, garlic, salt, olive oil, water, pine nuts and parmesan. It didn't exactly resemble the pesto sauces I have seen but it tasted good.


This picture doesn't really bring out the green colour, nor does it look gormet but it was good. Trust me.

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posted by Lauren @ 6:18 PM   0 comments
The Birth Of The Trickosphere
Ma and I did a lot of cooking today. She started off the day by cooking up a nice batch of scones which made a very tasty lunch. After my belly settled a little we went to pick up some supplies because I wanted to cook some food of Linda's party.

First, we made little smoked fish pies with a bread instead of pastry. I really actually can't take much credit because I didn't do a whole lot. I was more of an assistant in this endeavour. I cut the bread into circles and I spooned the smoked fish mixture into them. That is the extent of my help.



I do however take full credit for the making of what I have now dubbed Trickospheres - rum balls with a trick. The trick being that it is made with brandy instead of rum. It's a hard name to remember of the top of your head but I trust it will catch on in time.

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posted by Lauren @ 3:00 PM   0 comments
Friday, June 09, 2006
My (Dirty) Love Affair With Porridge

You know how they say "give peace a chance", well today I decided to "give porridge a chance". It really was that much of a gesture. See, the first time we met, I wasn't particularly impressed. In fact, they way it greeted me was more like an assault on my tongue. But this sensory attack was back in my Brownie days and in hindsight I realised this may have had more to do with the way it was prepared than the nature of porridge itself. After my much lamented divorce with Light 'N Tasty last week however, I had to get back out there and play the field. All the other lovers of porridge claim it to be wonderfully comforting in the morning and I have to say I give my second rendezvous with this age old tradition a thumbs up. The gooey texture is a little strange at first, but it grows on you. It's milky, nutty goodness warms you deep in your belly whilst gently calming the snarl of hunger. I added dried cranberry and apricot plus some sugar to sweeten mine, but the oatmeal I chose was of such quality I think it would have been quite tasty naked. I'm looking forward to all the different things I can do with my new friend oatmeal.

Dude, I just read that whole paragraph over and while I was going for a slight romantic innuendo, I didn't mean for it to be that sexy. Out of modesty, I could delete it but I find it funny. After all, food is a sensual experience. Maybe you didn't even notice, in which case, I've just alerted you to the fact and made myself look dirty all at once. I'm telling you it was unintentional.


I also tried rooibos tea today. Rooibos is African slang for a Dutch word and means "red bush", hence its other name red bush tea. The plant is actually green, but it has a nice red colour once it is fermented. It's very good for you and has a delicious slightly, nutty sweet flavour. It's been said to aid insomnia, irritability, headaches, nervous tension, hypertension, relieve stomach cramping and some allergies, and boost the immune system. I was also impressed to learn that it is great for irritated skin and contains anti-oxidants which help slow the aging process. I'm thinking I might try it as a toner. Food you can wear on your face. It doesn't get any better than that?

I made one of my simple signature dishes tonight. Usually, I'm a lazy cook. All I really need to be happy at dinner time is a stove with a frying pan and a rice cooker. Tonight, I cooked up one of my more recent variations on the tofu and rice/pasta dish. Tofu with mushroom, baby corn, sesame seed, pumpkin seed and sweet and sour sauce over rice. Except, I ran out of sweet and sour and had to supplement mild sweet chilli sauce. Simple but tasty.


BTW: The oatmeal/porridge at the top is not the actual bowl of porridge I consumed this morning. By now you know my food photos never look that professional. I'm to eager to chow than to do the food equivalent of ikebana.

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posted by Lauren @ 10:18 PM   0 comments
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Buon Apetito!
I've never tried to cook an authentic Italian meal before so I thought it was about time I tried. There were a few minor mishaps along the way, but the result was, according to my Dad, "the best thing you've ever cooked". I made lasagne al forno.


The recipe is too long to include here, but if you want it just ask. Sorry I can't add more pictures. My computer is being weird. Really I'm just thankful it let me add one. More to come once I overcome whatever is wrong with this mangled machine.

It took two hours to make, although it is supposed to take longer. When I skimmed over the recipe I didn't realise that the 'let simmer for 1 1/2-2 minutes' was actually 'let simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours'. Oopsies. Just means the flavour in the bolognese sauce didn't sink into the meat as much. It was quite an involved recipe. I've never used so many pots and pans in my life. When we had finally made the meat sauce, bechemel sauce, softened the lasagne sheets, grated the parmesan and layered it in the glass dish, I turned around to put it in the oven. This is about 5 minutes after I asked Ma if she had turned on the oven (it looked different) and she answered yes, so thinking Ma knows best I didn't give it a second thought. Well, Ma officially gets the award for dumbest mistake of the day. She hadn't turned the dial around to fanbake. The oven wasn't on! Double oopsies. We had to wait another 15 minutes for the oven heat up and then a further 15 minutes until the lasagne cooked. lol. Dad was quite hungry but he was satisfied in the end. It was pretty good. I'd only change a few things. Add some tomato sauce or paste to the bolognese meat sauce, simmer it for longer and maybe add a little something else to the bechemel because it needed a little bit of a kick. I had two helpings which my Ma pointed out was my meal plus someone else's. haha. When I put the effort into cooking, I like to reap the award. It's okay though, I'm back to the gym and eating healthy tomorrow.

I brought myself some new breakfast food to replace my beloved Light 'N Tasty. I got some Weetbix which I'm gonna either eat with milk or crunchy with yoghurt. I'm also going to experiment with this thing they call oatmeal porridge. I was never a fan of it before but I think that was because I never put any sugar or anything with it. I really wanted to buy some quinoa to try but I think I might have to go to a health food store to hunt that down. It was the staple food of the Mayans but it's just impossible to find here in NZ. This morning I ate leftover rice with milk, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar. It was quite good but would have been better with more cinnamon and maybe cream instead of milk, which kinda defeats the point of a healthy breakfast. I'll let you know how my breakfast experiment goes.

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posted by Lauren @ 6:36 PM   0 comments
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Food - Space Style
One thing I regret not trying while in America was the freeze-dried space food you can buy at Kennedy Space Center. I was quite curious, but alas, it was quite expensive and since I was only halfway through my great American exploration I was trying to limit my expenses.


Apparently shrimp cocktail is very popular in space, but they eat pretty much everything. Food also tastes different supposedly due to the shifting of body fluids. I wonder if I could handle spicy food in space then? I found a cool article on eating in space.

I find the bit about spilling quite funny. If you don't clean up your mess it might just hit you in the head later. I'm gonna mention that to Ma next time I mess up the kitchen.
posted by Lauren @ 9:48 PM   1 comments
Monday, June 05, 2006
The Yummiest Scone Ever
Food news is a little dry today so I thought I would showcase my favourite scone that comes courtesy of Starbucks - the Maple Walnut Scone. So good. I buy way more scones than I do coffee.

I have this habit of taking pictures with a chunk already eaten out of it. Just shows I can't wait to eat stuff, I guess.

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posted by Lauren @ 1:49 PM   0 comments
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Sweet Fudgy Goodness
Today I made some yummy fudge for my friends and I to enjoy. It turned out brilliantly. I only had one small hitch. I ran out of dark chocolate but luckily I had some Dairy Milk in the pantry to supplement it.

CHOCOLATE FUDGE

Ingredients
About 1 1/2 blocks of chocolate
1 (14oz) can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup butter

1/ Melt chocolate, condensed milk and butter in a microwave proof bowl on medium for 3-5 minutes, or until chocolate has melted. Make sure to stir several times.
2/ Pour into greased or baking paper lined dish (8x8 inch) and refridgerate until set.


The ingredients - so simple. Condensed milk is so yummy. You just know I licked the can.

Yummy fudgelicious goodness. It was hard to stop eating them.

I also had a spent a great night of eating with some of my oldest and best friends. It was a small feast of chicken, bread, cocktail sausages, coleslaw, chips and dip, fudge, chocolate cake and rum 'n raisin icecream.
I had to include a picture of Justina's quiet rage with poultry. She sure did mutilate that chicken good.

A totally candid shot of me eating our feast.

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posted by Lauren @ 3:28 PM   1 comments
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Goodbye Light 'N Tasty
Today, I must bid my favourite cereal goodbye from my diet. It's a sad day. We've had so many great times together. I never knew a cereal I truly loved before Light 'N Tasty. He opened my heart. But alas, I can no longer stomach our relationship and we are forced to part ways. It is a reluctant divorce but something has changed about him. He's different. He says he's "New and Improved" with "bigger and better fruit". But he's changed for the worst and to stop my stomach from doing that weird full but empty thing we're it feels like acids are slowly eating out my insides, I must let him go. It was good while it lasted but you're just not the same. Goodbye Light 'N Tasty. I loved you well.

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posted by Lauren @ 11:47 AM   0 comments
Friday, June 02, 2006
The Other White Meat

I was bumbling around the internet, looking up random things, as I do and I came across a reference to canned rattlesnake meat. I had never heard of this before but I guess you can get just about everything in a can these days. I decided to look up this rare delicacy. While not every family in America is chowing down on some snake, it's not that uncommon. I think one day I'd actually quite like to try. I imagine it would taste quite a lot like alligator, which tasted like chicken. I even managed to find some rattlesnake recipes. Baked rattlesnake, barbequed rattlesnake, deep-fried rattlesnake, dijon grilled rattlesnake, rattlesnake and beans and for the health minded even rattlesnake salad. Tasty. You're really only limited by your imagination. Remember that quote from Forrest Gump that Bubba says:
"Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it,
boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole,
shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon
shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad,
shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it."

Well, rattlesnake could be like that. Just about that only thing you can't do is rattlesnake sashimi because raw rattlesnake meat carries dangerous bacteria that can cause Salmonella poisoning. Expect pictures of me feasting upon rattlesnake next time I visit America.
posted by Lauren @ 6:46 PM   0 comments
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Black Sesame Pudding
For dessert, I made black sesame pudding. I'd love to say that it was gourmet and back breaking to prepare, but it didn't require too much skill. All I really did was mix the packaged ingredients with milk, bring to the boil, heat for 1 minute, cool and refridgerate. Not a lot of elbow grease there, but I didn't screw it up and that should be applauded.

Only two words there I can actually understand but luckily there are English instructions on the back.

Cooking the pudding on the stove. I was quite worried I was burning it because it took way longer to boil than I thought.


Setting the moulds. I had to eat an Aunt Betty's pudding for lunch just for an extra cup.


Yummy. Dad thought it looked like an eyeball. You should have seen it wobble. I was shaking it around and giggling. I could have had hours of entertainment.

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posted by Lauren @ 9:10 PM   0 comments
Puppies Of The Sea
Tonight was one of those not too common, but more increasingly frequent nights when I cook my family dinner. I think my growing love of cooking is a natural progression from my love of eating. It's also preparation for a somewhat domestic life, I expect to have later on in life. I get starry-eyed thinking about all the feasts I can cook up for my kids. Tonight's dinner was predominantely Japanese. The main consisted of fish, prawn and cucumber tempura on rice with miso soup.

The raw ingredients - cucumber, pre-cooked prawn, tempura mix and red cod. I didn't take a picture of the miso soup but that came from little individual packages of miso soup paste.

Tempura batter - Very simple to make - just add water and mix.

Chopped seafood - Don't it just look so tasty. I love prawn. They're so cute. Like little puppies of the sea.

Cooking the tempura was quite dangerous. That hot oil sure does like to spit at ya. Ma kindly served as my assistant. I needed a bit of hand flipping the tempura and trying not to burn myself. The batter didn't really stick to the prawn very well. Maybe because I forgot to de-shell them. Oops. They were quite crunchy. lol. But I did remember to pull the heads off so that's something. I felt quite brutal ripping heads off my little puppies of the sea but it had to be done. Who wants to eat those little black eyeballs? I'm sure digestion will be hard enough eating their shells.

Bon apetit! My delicious meal complete. That's satay and sweet and sour sauce at the top. Not very Japanese but it's what I felt like dipping my tempura in. The cucumber is serving as a makeshift divider between the two.

Despite the hot oil trying to give me a facial and forgetting to de-shell the prawn, I rate this dinner pretty well. All agreed it was tasty.

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posted by Lauren @ 8:05 PM   0 comments
She Who Eats

Name: Lauren
Home: Auckland, New Zealand
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