You've gotta hand it to the sandwich

The following post is dedicated to one of my dearest friends: Frances Grant. This girl is one of the coolest cats out. I met Frances way back in August 2007 in strange circumstances. At a friends seventeenth birthday both of us were alarmed by a boy hiding under a red cloth that covered a table. Questioning the boys actions was the moment we first spoke, and once our concern had been expressed we talked some more. Upon exclaiming our mutual desire to be involved in the media industry we decided to be magazine editor besties! Following my bid to ditch the boys for books in the hope of gaining the UAI I needed for my dream course, along came Frances, like an Angel into my life. And so, with her blinding halo we skipped into the sunset, choosing to spend our Saturdays of year 12, shopping, sunbaking, and being generally spontaneous in the city, and wile away our study vacations prancing and posing in and around the State Library. Always chasing that boy, always searching for that bargain and always seeking that tasty snack. Not only did she contribute to my survival of the HSC, but she was also my most definitive fashion influence. Under her wing I have since found it trés difficult to succumb to pants over swishing skirts and flowy frocks. Whilst, my wardrobe is certainly overflowing so much so that my clothes have begun to take residence in the study built-in, I doubt I will ever have a collection as magnificent as Miss Grant's. FACT: at one point last year the rod in her cupboard actually collapsed under the burdern of beautiful garments. Furthermore, her eclectic, romantic love of music brought me hours of joy in the form of mixtapes, which would come with one of her surrealistic montage pictures on the cover. These mixtapes provided me with the soundtrack for countless times scrapbooking, card making and dreaming in my garage in a bid to escape study. She is also the queen of snacking and her favourite fiendish treats are such simple pleasures such as vegemite on crackers, an alphabetical fridge of cheese and plenty of bread. So crazy is she that she once actually set herself a daily sandwich quota to limit the amount of she was consuming per day. She failed. But she certainly wins life! And my heart<3

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Eating alone, for me, is most often a prompt to shop. This is where self-absorption and consumerism meet - a rapt, satisfyingly convoluted pleasure. The food I want most to buy is the food I most often try not to eat - a swollen-bellied tranche of cheese, a loaf of bread. These constitute the perfect meal. A slither of gorgonzola or coulommiers sacrificed on the intrusive and unyielding surface of a biscuit at the end of dinner is food out of kilter. Just bread and cheese is fine to give others if you're shown the kind of consideration of providing variety. But I want for myself the obsessive focus of the one huge, heady, haveuse soft cheese, or else a wedge of the palate burning hard stuff, a vintage Cheddar or strong blue - too much, too strong. If I'm eating a salty blue cheese, it's texture somewhere between creamy and crumbly, I want baguette or a bitter, fudge-coloured pain au levain; with Cheddar, real Cheddar, I want doughier white bread - whichever, it must be a whole loaf. I might eat tomatoes with the bread and cheese, but the tomatoes mustn't be in a salad, but left whole on the plate, to be slice or chopped, à la minute.

- Nigella Lawson, 'How to Eat', extracted from 'Solitary Pleasures' in The Virago Book of Food, The Joy of Eating

Tonight I went down into the kitchen to make myself dinner. The cupboards and the fridge were far more bare than fair, with a severe shortage of fruit, vegetable and meat. Tossing up between an omelette, a make-shift paella, pasta or a salad, I realized none would make the cut with what was at hand. So I put my hands to work, spreading caramelised capsicum jam on light rye bread, then layering slices of Brie and leftover barbecue chicken on top before popping the whole package into the jaffle iron with plenty of Olive oil spray. Two minutes later and I gotta hand it to you the sandwich - sweet, tangy, creamy, with a little bite, tender chicken and soft yet crunchy bread just hit the spot. I can now see how Frances Grant finds it so hard to adhere to the sandwich quota.

Edith Piaf's, 'Non je ne regrette rien', (I have no regrets) is one of Frances' favourite songs of all time. Those of you who saw Inception would recognize the ascending brass notes as the 'kick', the music designed to warn the dreamers that they would soon exit a dream. It's such a powerful piece of music which I initially discovered from watching La vie en Rose (2007), a recent movie that dramatises the life of Edith Piaf. Marion Cottilard plays the French singer known as "the little Bird", in an un-chronological story of the triumphs and tragedies in her rollercoaster rise and fall. The movie comes to a magnificent round off when this track is sung at the end.

A movie with heart, guts, and a hell of a set of lungs.

 Also, the song reminds me of my adventurous, gluttonous, attitude to food, of which non je ne regrette rien!