This made dinner plans with her rather stressful as one week you could be off to an eight-course degustation dinner, the next she’d be handing you a bag of carrots and an enema kit.

Lisa’s obsession started when she was hired as a fashion correspondent for a television network where she was expected to wear the sample clothing supplied by designers. However, sample-sized clothing is built for barely pubescent models, not 32-year-old blondes of German descent with rather large hips.

After yet another stretch at a rehab clinic Lisa decided ‘‘thinking small’’ was the answer and so she found a herself a new roommate – a short statured person. Her logic behind this was that ‘‘surely little people eat less’’. She invested in tiny plates and silverware and announced it was all about portion control. Dinner was a riot as it’s rather hard to keep a straight face when you’re eating off dinnerware I suspect was part of Barbie’s Dream Kitchen.

The whole exercise lasted two weeks after it became apparent that her tiny roommate had the appetite of an elephant and believed that ‘‘deep fried’’ was the key to a good meal.

Joy finally came when, on a trip to France, Lisa discovered the canapé. Having grown up in a town where the closest thing to a canapé was spray cheese on a salt cracker, being able to eat micro-sized tuna nicoise and other morsels of loveliness was her idea of heaven.

The irony is that the word canapé comes from the French word for couch, which is about the size Lisa ended up after 12 months of canape-ing, proving that not all good things come in small packages.

Although, as we discover in this week’s special feature, some of Melbourne’s tiniest kitchens are serving up some of our biggest tastes.

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