When royal chef Mark Flanagan unveiled his recipe for the Coronation Quiche last Monday, I was delighted to read that it had been chosen by the King and Queen Consort due to it being ‘a good sharing dish, can be served hot or cold, suits a variety of dietary requirements and preferenes, can be adapted, and is not too complicated […]
I joke that ninety-seven percent of the spontaneous conversations that my friends start with me – especially mid afternoon or early in the evening – are panicked cookery conundrums, photographs of burned pans, musings about what to have for dinner based on photographs of their kitchen cupboards, or emergency cake queries. This afternoon was no exception. It started off innocently […]
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 […]
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 […]
My column in Society Guardian, Monday 8th December 2014. “Poor people don’t know how to cook”, Baroness Anne Jenkin said at the launch of the Feeding Britain report yesterday, and suddenly it was as though ten months of evidence gathering, and 160 pages of written report, hadn’t happened, cast aside to be summed up in seven words. Welcome to the new politics, where every character counts, and every statement met with an equal and polarising one. Instead of discussing and debating the 77 recommendations in the report on Monday evening, as a former food bank user who had given oral evidence to the committee myself in July, I found myself on regional and national radio and television, being asked about Baroness Jenkin instead. And herein one of the big problems with politics today lies: instead of discussing the issues at hand, the baying mobs on all sides are waiting in the wings for someone to say something imperfect, and they pounce, hurling insults and escalating debate into personal attacks and rudeness, and nobody is talking about hungry people or how to feed them any more. Instead it’s all ‘those big bad Tories’ fault, or ‘the Church shouldn’t be commenting at all because they have a bit of gold kicking about’, or it ‘started under Labour…’ The longer we all stand on opposing sides shouting over each other, the longer the queues around the foodbanks get, and the longer the benefit […]
A few weeks ago, I was asked to collaborate on a film project with the Guardian, Royal Court theatre, playwright Laura Wade (who wrote ‘Posh’, recently released as the film ‘The Riot Club’, about the notorious Bullingdon Club) and director Carrie Cracknell, on a microplay film project based around current affairs. I was asked to be part of the food […]
This week, I’ve been taking part in the annual Live Below the Line challenge, living on £1 a day or less to raise money for Oxfam (you can sponsor me here). People say I should find it easy, considering my history of living on a tight budget for myself and my son. But I survived those periods by growing herbs […]
Last night I decided to work out the nutritional value of my Live Below The Line challenge. In previous years, I have felt in turn tired, lethargic, bloated, hungry and had carb spikes followed by huge crashes. My blood sugar is a bit bonkers at the best of times – I avoid lactose and too many unprocessed white carbs – […]
Well, the Smalls went back to nursery this morning, so I dashed to the shops afterwards on an empty stomach, clutching my fiver for this year’s Live Below The Line challenge. I no longer live in Southend on Sea next to the big orange supermarket that was my lifeline when I was living on an excruciatingly tight (and often non […]
I’m taking the Live Below The Line challenge again this year; from 28th April to 2nd May I’ll living on £1 a day for 5 days, to raise money for Oxfam. No donated food, no sneaky spices from my store cupboard, battening down the hatches with just five £1 coins to spend for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I did it […]
Last month I spent 10 days in Tanzania with Oxfam, meeting women and farmers who had been involved in Oxfam projects including Raising Her Voice and Female Food Heroes. Click here to watch the video. My trip to Tanzania is something that I think about every day. I miss Anna and Sister Martha terribly, and I hope to return very soon. With thanks to Oxfam Tanzania, Oxfam Ireland, Oxfam GB, Fred Nyatori (director), Mora McLagan (photography), and Caterina Monsanzi and Michael Tait at the Guardian. Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MsJackMonroe
Last Saturday night was the second of mine and my friend Juliet’s ‘Charity Curry Nights’. The format is simple; people book in advance, I cook up a load of curry, people turn up on the night, pay, eat said curry, and we donate the proceeds to charity. I’m loving it, although cooking curry for 25 people might sound like some […]
Irene is 24 years old, a single mother to a two year old girl. She lost her job in 2012, and has moved house at least four times since. Unable to find work, she is living in a friends bedroom in a shared house, borrowing food from neighbours. “You should meet Irene,” Marc and Teresa had said. “You have very […]
We bounded into an Oxfam Land Cruiser early this morning – after a breakfast of mandazi (deep fried donuts) and fresh eggs and banana at the hotel. I’m really enjoying the local cuisine, but it deserves it’s own blog post I think! We (me, Mora from Oxfam GB, and Bill and Teresa from Oxfam in Dar Es Salaam) were setting […]
I watched the sky darken for the impending sunset at Heathrow Airport, in England, and a night-flight later stepped out into glaring sunlight – a brand new day in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. I am here with Oxfam GB, meeting up with Oxfam Tanzania, to work together on a few projects. I have been involved with Oxfam since their Walking The Breadline report last year, which exposed the scale of food bank use in Britain. I was one of the case studies in the report, and indicated a wish to work with Oxfam on further projects. Later in the year they asked me if I would consider being an Ambassador for their UK poverty projects, and I accepted. So why, as a UK ambassador, do I find myself in Tanzania? It is a good question, with no straightforward answer – but I will attempt to clumsily put down my thoughts. I was invited by Jane Foster, the UK country director for Oxfam in Tanzania, to visit some projects centred around women, motherhood, farming and land, and to write about them for Oxfam. I have guest blogged for Oxfam on a number of projects and issues this year, including the G8 summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, last summer, as part of the Enough Food If campaign. I have said since I first signed my book deal (and later Sainsburys) that I would be donating a percentage of my royalties to projects […]
To read the full article, click here: The Hunger Names by Ros Wynne-Jones, Daily Mirror, Monday 9 December Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MxJackMonroe Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/agirlcalledjack This blog is free to those who need it, and always will be, but it does of course incur costs to run and keep it running. If you use it and benefit, enjoy it, and […]
Today I have launched a campaign in the Daily Mirror, a petition to investigate the causes of food bank use and hunger in the UK today. After speaking at both major party conferences this summer about the realities of food banks and poverty in the UK, after sharing my experiences again and again, after countless reports from Oxfam and the […]
I’m often asked by my readers and on Twitter what I would suggest donating to a food bank, so I have compiled a list of ambient products that can be found in most supermarkets. They’re ambient on purpose – so that neither the food bank nor the recipient will have to worry about storing them in a fridge, and there […]
So the #22mealsforacoffee hashtag is still going viral and the original post is second only to the original Hunger Hurts for hits on my blog now, with 100,000 today alone. In the meantime, Ocado and Tesco have expressed an interest in adding a ‘Food bank pack’ to their online shop as an option for people to donate… But while they […]
While typing my previous post, I had a bit of a brainwave. And I wonder if I can get something going here, with almost 10,000 Twitter followers, 5,000 Facebook fans, 2,000 Facebook friends, 3,000 email subscribers… I wonder if… If, instead of spending £3 on a coffee today, tomorrow, this week, you could do this instead. Go to your nearest supermarket, and buy the following: (I’ve priced mine at Sainsburys, but other major supermarkets are similarly priced): 2 tins of baked beans – 22p each 1 jar of fish paste – 32p 1 can of sardines – 55p 1 tin of chopped tomatoes – 31p 1 tin of carrots – 20p 1 loaf of bread – 50p 1 jar of jam – 29p 1 bag of pasta – 39p TOTAL: £3.00 And go and put it in a carrier bag and take it straight to your local food bank, or a friend or neighbour in need. Because one latte = 16 slices of bread and jam + 6 portions of beans on toast + 2 portions of pasta with fish paste + 4 portions of pasta with sardines and tomatoes. One latte = 22 meals. No, not nutritionally perfect, but better than hunger. If you have the extra cash, replace the jam with peanut butter. Add some tinned spinach or more tinned tomatoes, some stewed steak or tinned meat. I don’t care what you spend that £3 on – just […]
As Live Below The Line comes to a close, I just had a quick glance at my fundraising page and am staggered to be able to report that – thanks to the incredible generosity of my friends, family and readers through both of my LBL challenges this year – I’ve raised£3,496 for Oxfam to help tackle poverty in the UK, […]
I’ve done it. Not once, but twice, I’ve made £5 of shopping last seven days, eaten three times a day, for the annual Live Below The Line challenge. I’ve had some delicious surprises, like a sad wrinkly peach chopped up and steeped in boiling water for 15 minutes makes a delicious tea, and the best surprise of the week was […]
COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP 