I’ve made corn bread about nine times this year and every time I do I think to myself “I must blog this recipe” as it’s one of my favourites. But the kitchen needs cleaning and the children need entertaining and there’s a wash to put on and a week goes by and I forget all about it. So this […]
It’s been almost a week now since I fell ill at Ballymaloe literary festival on Friday night – festival-goers hopefully didn’t notice my decidedly below-par sluggishness under a professional veneer of an inch of makeup and a litre of strong sugary tea, as I was there to work and didn’t want to let anyone down by cancelling any events at […]
As part of my ‘health binge’ that I’m currently embarking on after the carbtastic Live Below The Line challenge followed by scarcely and sleep and a lot of crap sandwiches to power through a General Election, I decided to experiment and see if I could make gluten free pasta. I’m not a fan of ‘gluten free’ flour, having used […]
As part of my ‘health binge’ that I’m currently embarking on after the carbtastic Live Below The Line challenge followed by scarcely and sleep and a lot of crap sandwiches to power through a General Election, I decided to experiment and see if I could make gluten free pasta. I’m not a fan of ‘gluten free’ flour, having used […]
Some people say socca, some say farinata; I decided to christen my breakfast this morning ‘gramcake’ – a pancake made with gram flour and little else. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to crack into my bag of gram flour, seeing it ticks all of my culinary boxes – it’s high in protein, versatile, and I can […]
One of my readers got in touch last week to say that they had started baking bread using recipes from my book and blog, and that it helped immensely with their anxiety. I totally get that – I find if I’m having a wobbly day, or week, a good session of kneading dough helps to work through it somewhat. It’s […]
As part of my ‘health binge’ I am currently indulging in, I bought a bag of gram flour from the supermarket. At £1.30 for a kilo (brand: KTC, widely available at major supermarkets), it’s not as cheap as Basics flour, but it is gluten free and very versatile, or so I’m told. I used to shuffle past it in the […]
When I was a little girl, I would sit waiting near the front door after I finished my breakfast, waiting for my Dad to come home. A key in the lock, and I would run to hug a man who reeked of smoke and petrol and boot polish, a man who sometimes came home quiet and shaken, and didn’t often talk about his […]
Jack Monroe. You can follow me on Twitter & Instagram @MsJackMonroe This was my Live Below The Line challenge to raise money for Street Child United – I’ll blog all of the recipes I haven’t got around to over the next couple of days. In the meantime you can read about it (and sponsor me!) over on […]
This morning saw the use-up of some of my last ingredients from Monday’s £5 ‘below the line’ shop – including the largest of all the bananas at a whopping 11p (the other two were 6p and 7p respectively) – I’d been saving this one until the bitter end as in previous years I’ve used all the good stuff first and […]
I found myself eating dinner at 5pm today, shattered and raggedy around the edges and having spent much of the afternoon in a blanket sullenly poking at my phone and trying to work. I guess the teeny tiny roast vegetable soup didn’t quite cut it on the satisfaction front, but I hit a sort of panic and started rationing ingredients […]
Last night I made bread for the family – none for me, but I’m hoping there will be some left by Saturday morning – and while the oven was on I decided to fling half an onion and one of my carrots into the bottom of it, sliced and sitting in a roasting tin with a little oil. Oh, I’m […]
This breakfast is so simple it hardly needs a recipe, but in ‘normal life’ it’s one of my favourite quick breakfasts anyway, so as soon as I had the peaches in my basket and realised the breakfast potential, I started looking forward to this. Imagine if the grapefruit had been in stock, I would have denied myself the small pleasure of tucking into this this morning – funny how things work out. I used 80g from my rapidly-diminishing 500g natural yoghurt, which came in at 9p (the yoghurt was 55p for 500g in the Monday shop) and 50g of peaches, which worked out at 5p (they were 40p for 411g). So all in, a 14p breakfast that wasn’t as big as I’d have liked it to be, but I’m rationing remaining ingredients now – if I’m careful I can have this again as a snack or dessert today or tomorrow! So far, with the generosity of friends and readers, I’ve raised £3,768 for Street Child United by doing this challenge – nearly double my target, and quite overwhelmed at all of the support and kindness. If you haven’t donated or want to check the page out, head over to http://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/agirlcalledjack Jack Monroe. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @MsJackMonroe
Love is making a rye and beer bread loaf for other people when you’re in the middle of doing Live Below The Line. Fact. This year’s LBLUK challenge (living on £1 a day for 5 days to raise money for Street Child United) has been strangely discombobulating as I find myself with two toddlers and a cacophonous revolving door of […]
Day three, dinner three, sees me over the middle hump of this year’s Live Below The Line challenge. In previous years, I’ve found myself at the end of the week with the scraps and scrag-ends of my £5-for-5-days food shop, exhausted, cranky, and willing it to be over as I try to be inventive with whatever bits and pieces there are left. I’m trying not to let that happen too much this year; in the same way I gently encourage my 5 year old not to leave the ‘green veg’ on his plate until the end for a dragged-out, miserable dinner experience (if anyone finds the answer as to why small boys are totally happy to eat their own bright green bogies and lick their radioactive-looking snot from their noses but abhor anything green that might be good for them, please, I’m dying to know) – I decided to shoehorn some of the ‘scraps’ into the week, rather than drag my heels and pouty lower lip all the way to Friday. So here we are, Wednesday, and a broccoli stalk soup. Rather this than the mushy peas, anyhow, that are glaring at me passive-aggressively from the worktop and filling me with fear. I decided to dice and slightly char the broccoli stalk – there’s no real knowledge or science behind this decision, I just figured it needs all the help it can get to take it from ‘thing I would […]
This morning I went shopping for Live Below The Line, having spent well over an hour last night researching the nearest cheapest supermarket to me, their ranges and products, and making a list of potential contenders for ingredients by food group. Anyone thinking this looks like an extraneous amount of effort? It’s how I used to shop all the time. […]
Makes 4 small pancakes 20g barley flour (pearl barley, ground in blender and sifted), 2p 40g natural yoghurt, 4p 1 egg, 14p 2 peach slices (30g), 3p To make the barley flour, I put a few handfuls of pearl barley in my blender and pulsed it for 30 seconds, then repeated an absolutely laborious amount of times. Tipped it […]
Before you read this I should clarify that I am not back on my Twitter account. My blog and Instagram accounts both automatically link to it and publish new posts, so this may publish on my account but I am not going to access it to delete it, because I have deleted the app and do not want to go into my account, and apologise for any confusion. Dear readers, I have always tried to strike a balance between keeping you all updated with any major twists and turns in my frankly unusual life, without bombarding you with so much extraneous detail that the recipes get buried beneath an amateur imitation of a weekly glossy magazine. So, while there may not be red screaming circles of shame around my dark baggy eyes or shock horror headlines at being caught without any makeup on, I do feel I owe it to the loyalty of my readers to keep you informed about events and affairs. Of the ‘day to day life’ type, not the kiss-and-tell type, to be clear. It gets me in a little trouble sometimes, like the casual uploading of my Green Party welcome letter to my Instagram account being picked up by the Telegraph and subsequently plastered across the media, but those are the growing pains of a life led largely in public. One of my old Labour Party friends, who is a local councillor and a man I […]
First up in celebrating our multi-cultural foodie society, is the great Italian classic, pizza. For those of you so deeply ingrained in patriotism that you have never had, enjoyed or endorsed a pizza, you are missing out. The act of covering a fermented bread with toppings and cheese in fact goes back as far as the Ancient Greeks, who favoured […]
Top of the MORNING to ya! I love St Patrick’s Day, me, and not just because of my Irish mother and her large and characterful Irish family, but because it’s also my BIRTHDAY. And how wonderful it is to walk into the pub on my birthday and be greeted with an Irish band singing Chieftains covers, a loud bunch of […]
This delicious ham casserole is adapted from a favourite old recipe of mine – where I would boil the ham joint whole to make a stock, before shredding it into the casserole. This faster version is no compromise, making a delicious hearty dinner in less than half the time. For an extra special twist, serve with crusty bread topped with […]
As part of the ongoing Joy Project, here’s some of the things that have made me laugh, smile, and feel joyous this week… Starting with the rogue cheeky pigeon in the bathroom that kept a good few Twitter followers entertained!! Jack […]
I’m very honoured to have been a part of this book, along with many friends and other cooks, chefs, dieticians, and nutritionists. I have lost two good and important men in my life to Cancer recently, and know that if this book had been around before now I would have given it to them, their families, and many other […]
A few weeks ago I received an invitation in the post to the 25th birthday party of BBC Good Food – and squeaked with excitement. I credit the BBC Good Food website as being one of the main ways I taught myself to cook, by looking up and poring over recipes online, studiously copying them into notebooks that I still […]
I love making a mushroom stock when I have a few shrivelling up in the drawer of the fridge, cooking them long and slow with some garlic and onion and some dried or fresh herbs, before freezing it to use as the base of a flavoursome risotto or stew… Pungent and almost truffley, at just a fraction of the […]
Some of the things that have brought me joy this week… Jack Monroe. Twitter & Instagram @MsJackMonroe
Yesterday, a very kind man asked me to name three things recently that have brought me joy. I was a bit down in the dumps (to put it very, very mildly), it wasn’t an out of the blue question. I paused. “My son. My kids. They bring me joy. They’re so funny, if you just listen to them and their […]
A few days ago I interviewed the wonderful, resourceful, innovative and very charming Nick Andrew for an upcoming feature for BBC Radio 4. For those who don’t know Nick, he’s a man who has lived in his car for the last eight years. Yes, lived in his car for eight years. And still does. We talked Trangias and Sporks, travel […]
This is an article that I wrote for the Guardian in December that I didn’t post on my blog, because I hadn’t done anything ‘political’ on here for so long that I didn’t want to scare people away. But I am who I am, and this is a very big part of who I am, so if you’re here for […]
COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP 