This piece started after an article in the Independent about the top 10 foods that we apparently throw away in the UK. I took to Twitter to ask people what usually ended up in their bin, and then spent a whole day and night answering hundreds of queries – some of them came up a lot, like bread and mushrooms, […]
These are the handy hints in the front of my first cookbook, A Girl Called Jack and are as useful now as they were then – it’s advice I give readers all the time, old and new, so I thought it would be handy to pop it here too: WRITE A LIST AND STICK TO IT. It sounds obvious, but I […]
On Monday afternoon, I received a message from the Daily Mirror, asking if I would be interested in writing a piece about food. Having discussed almost nothing but my body for a fortnight, I leapt at the chance to get back into the kitchen with gusto, and said yes. They asked if, in response to Prince Charles plea for […]
PBJ cookies: 3 tbsp sunflower oil 2 tbsp sugar 1 egg 2 heaped tbsp peanut butter 8 heaped tbsp self raising flour Preheat the oven to 180C and lightly grease a baking sheet in preparation. Mix the oil and sugar together in a mixing bowl with a wooden spoon until well combined. Add the egg yolk and the peanut […]
Starting with a Sunday roast and breaking it down into leftovers the way my mother always did – although in her case it was a chicken made into chinese chicken curries and avgolemono soup, recipes for which are available on my blog. I’ve started with a pork shoulder, I don’t buy meat just for myself any more but recently cooked […]
I’ve tried to account for a variety of lunch situations – from filling protein-packed soups for homes or offices with microwaves, to portable mini pizzas for kids lunch boxes (my son’s school had a mini fit the first time I sent him in with a pizza so a I put two together and told him if anyone asks it’s a […]
Shopping list – based on Sainsburys, prices correct at time of publication. Other major supermarkets have similar products available at comparable prices. TOTAL: £35.42 or £8.86 per person Meat/Dairy/Protein: £13.80 1kg boneless pork shoulder joint, £3 670g cooking bacon, £1.15 500g frozen white fish, £1.70 1 tin of sardines, 40p 6 mixed weight free range eggs, £1 400g dried […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
HELLO and welcome back, dear readers. It’s been a whole ten days since I foolishly skidded down the stairs at silly o clock in the morning and found my toes sticking out at odd angles and my sorry ass in the waiting room at Charing Cross A&E, and what a long and frustrating ten days it’s been. I haven’t strictly been taking life as easily as instructed, not being the type who can sit still for ten minutes let alone loaf around in bed with my foot in the air. I did a day of filming for a campaign that comes out tomorrow, wobbling around with a walking stick between takes, was kindly invited to the Telegraph’s ‘Out At Work Top 50 LGBT Executives’ thingy at the House Of Commons (and bailed after 20 minutes, unable to stand and smile simultaneously and sure nobody wanted me grimacing and whimpering in the corner all night like a proper party pooper) and did a much-longer-than-usual food shoot for the Guardian – thankyou Linda, who was kind and understanding and didn’t rush me as I shuffled around the kitchen grumbling to myself. And through all of that, my family have been kind and understanding and generous and very very caring, from the toddlers ‘finding’ my stick for me to help me walk around the house, to endless cups of tea in my bed-work-nest, to them all leaving me alone to wallow in frustration […]
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 […]
Happy book birthday! And so the day is finally here, and true to form on publication day, I’ve spent most of my waking hours on various radio stations and chatting to journalists, not to mention signing a pile of 503 quite large and heavy books in the Penguin offices on the Strand. And now, finally collapsing in a quiet corner […]
This is part mac ‘n’ cheese, part cauliflower cheese, and deliciously golden and moreish with some crispy bacon thrown in for good measure. Baking it at the end to melt the cheese isn’t essential, but oh, it’s so good. It’s a quicker method than the traditional ‘melt some butter and flour to make a roux then thin with a little […]
By Tom Lamont Sunday 19 October 2014 The winner of OFM’s Blogger of the Year apologises, when we speak, for not blogging all that much in the weeks leading up to our chat. Jack Monroe’s online diary, about cooking for herself and her young son on a limited budget , got her a Guardian column and publishing deal, transforming this […]
For the original article, click here. Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MsJackMonroe. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/agirlcalledjack
“Someone tell Jack Monroe she has something in her hair!” someone tweeted me at 11pm last night. That would be sick then, or sicked-up shrimp, to be precise. A combination of television nerves and a not-quite-right pub lunch, but according to my Twitter feed, only three people noticed the glob of something indeterminate and pink looking in my fringe as […]
It’s one thing being asked to go on BBC Question Time as the token ‘non politician’ that they like to throw in to mix things up again – it’s another thing entirely making your QT debut on election night, and being seated between the deputy chair of UKIP and a senior Conservative MP. Anyway, I won’t spoil the surprises: you […]
Hello! So excitingly, my first video for Jamie Oliver’s FoodTube went online last night, a rhubarb and ginger soda bread recipe. I was supposed to be making an ordinary soda bread, but on the morning of the shoot I came downstairs to find my dearest had left some sad-looking rhubarb in the sink with instructions to ‘use this […]
Just a quick post to share some super exciting news that I’ve been hugging to my ample chest for the past couple of weeks: THERE’S DEFINITELY GOING TO BE A BOOK TWO!! Whoop woo! I signed the contract yesterday, so figure I can release the cat from the bag (I’m not very good at secrets, as you all know!) – […]
COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP 