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 […]
One of my most clicked-on, photographed, and tweeted-about recipes is ‘the 9p burger’, a carrot, cumin and kidney bean burger born of a toddler nagging for burgers and an empty storecupboard and a handful of change. Mashed and shallow fried, they looked like burgers, and he wasn’t any the wiser – though I’m sure he can tell the difference three […]
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 […]
Firstly, for the budget-conscious among you raising eyebrows at the use of a bottle of the authentic black stuff in a batch of brownies, fear not, for this recipe makes 24 of the little tinkers, and uses a little over half a can at that, so you could stretch to 40ish from a single can if you’ve a crowd to […]
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 […]
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 […]
This burger is where the media storm began, and dubbed ‘the 9p burger’ because of the low cost of the ingredients used to make it, it’s one of my most popular recipes. A can of value range red kidney beans is a cheap but excellent source of protein and I built a lot of my early cooking around it, and […]
Barley is one of the cheapest grains currently available in shops and supermarkets, and my mum made pearl barley soup for us when I was a child, loaded with tiny chopped spring vegetables, carrots, spring greens and nutty pearl barley. I’ve taken her Northern Irish heritage and added some of my favourite spices for a warming, wholesome soup. Soaking your […]
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 […]
Over the last few days I’ve been inundated with tweets, comments and emails from anonymous accounts, all with the same thinly veiled message. Here’s a couple of the charmers… Bizarre that this should all start up again, I thought, especially on Twitter, where my profile clearly states: …So if someone has gone to the trouble of looking me up on Twitter (or Instagram or any other social media) to send targeted, deliberate and frankly unimaginative abuse, how could they fail to notice that I HAVE A JOB. So, once and for all I thought I’d scribble a brief but handy rebuttal to the anonymous abusers, to save me the bother of replying repeatedly to their piteous attempt at venom and spite: I have a job. I have a few, actually, which I a bonus, because for a long time I didn’t have one at all, and that was fairly crummy. Curious? I’m an AUTHOR – two books out there in the big wide world already for purchase, and two more in my head and in the creating stages. To shed a little light on the matter, books don’t write themselves, and neither do recipes. Recipes need to be dreamed up or researched, then cooked and tested a few times, rewritten, and put into a pile. That pile is eventually shuffled into chapters, any chapters that are a bit light on material need more recipes put in, so more dreaming, researching, […]
This morning I woke up, walked out of the bedroom, skidded down the stairs, and crashed my foot into the wall with the full force of my rapidly-descending body slamming behind it. I spent the rest of the morning in Charing Cross A&E, where despite looking extremely light on staff, I was seen relatively quickly, by a doctor who used to be a psychiatrist and before that lived in the Phillipines (we had a great food chat!) I had my wonky-looking foot X-Rayed by a very kind radiographer, the doctor set it and strapped it up, and I cleared a good deal of my work diary for the immediate future. Walking with a stick on bruises and fractures and sprains is not really conducive to prancing about in a kitchen testing recipes, well, not as early as Monday, anyway. BUT, I made a New Years resolution to cook or make something new every day – so apologies that today’s may be fairly low level, but I can’t stand unaided right now and I’ve sprained my right shoulder, so chopping and slicing and dicing is temporarily beyond me… However, it’s something I’ve been meaning to get to grips with for a while, so simple it may be, but it’s also delicious, and comforting. Ladies, gentlemen and non-binary readers, I bring to you an oh so simple chilli hot chocolate… Serves two (you’ll probably want both!) 500ml milk (can be made with […]
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 […]
I’m often asked how I cost my recipes – so thought that it would make sense to list the products I buy in one place, as a handy storecupboard or shopping guide. Obviously this os tailored to my household, our budget, what we buy and use – we are two adults and two children after all! But I hope it helps as a rough idea as to where those 6p carrots and individual cloves of garlic come from… I also thought it would help to track prices – as when I started writing this blog, stock cubes were 10p for 10, and this morning as I type this, they are 25p for 10 – so the prices on my recipes date quickly, but are correct at the time of going to print. All prices are Sainsburys own brand or Basic range where available, unless otherwise stated, and this list will be updated with every new budget, costed recipe I add. I’ll go back through the archives and compile it from older recipes too, and update their prices where necessary, but that is weeks of work – over 200 recipes to edit and recalculate – so bear with me! Here’s what I buy and in what quantities, to try to get the most out of my shopping: Fruit and vegetables: Onions, 1.5kg bag (average 15 onions): 95p (Nov 14) Garlic, 2 bulbs (average 10 cloves per bulb): 35p (Nov 14) Carrots, […]
I often receive letters and emails from friends, family and readers asking for ideas for cheap lunches. Aside from the ubiquitous cheese sandwich or home made scone-muffin-type-thing and an apple, banana or pear, one of my favourite staple lunches for this time of year is A Good Hearty Soup. And nothing says hearty soup quite like one packed with pasta and beans and chunky vegetables! I’ve been making minestrone soup for so long, I’m amazed it didn’t make it into either of my books – but I guess I’d never taken the time to write the recipe down and think about it too much. It’s one of my staples for a leftover half can of beans or chopped tomatoes, a scraggy little carrot or half an onion in the bottom of the veg drawer, tired greens, and those little broken bits of pasta in the bottom of the bag, or odds and sods of pasta that aren’t quite enough to do anything with. I keep all the last few bits of pasta, and the broken bits, in a large jar, smashed to smithereens – perfect for tossing into soups like this one. Why buy specialty tiny pasta, when you can make your own?! Makes six mug-sized portions or four generous bowlfuls: 1 onion, 6p 2 fat cloves of garlic, 4p 1 carrot, 6p 1 tbsp oil (sunflower or vegetable), 3p 400g tin or carton of chopped tomatoes, 40p 600ml chicken […]
The highlight of the Observer Food Monthly awards last Thursday, for me, was being able to personally thank two of the people whose recipes I learned and loved over the last decade, to the point where, in my bleakest times of staring at a few white-labelled value range groceries and some frozen or canned vegetables, I could recall good recipes from my repertoire that – with a little tweak here and a substitution or two there – would form the basis of good, nutritious, cheap meals. Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson might not have known it, but their books and their food instilled in me a love of cooking, and the confidence to explore, experiment and create, with what little I had. My pasta alla genovese was based on a recipe from Lawson’s ‘Kitchen’ (albeit with sunflower oil instead of olive, tinned potatoes and cheap spaghetti) as was my Spanish chicken. Nigel Slater’s words, his columns, his books, took me through a looking glass into a wonderland of technicolor sensuality – from bleak desperation to tentative exploration of smells, tastes, flavours, in-season fruits and vegetables and the transformative effects of lots and lots of gorgeous garlic. I remember watching his Simple Suppers series, some years ago, always with a notebook and a pen in my hand, and digging out that notebook when times got tough. He unknowingly taught me about herbs, flavours, excited me, delighted me, talked to me about […]
This started out as a curious thought in the back of my head – I know garlic softens and sweetens the longer you cook it, so could I make garlic jam? I scribbled some notes based on what little I know about jam making, dug out an old onion marmalade recipe to use as a rough guide, and promptly forgot […]
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 – […]
Faced with a leftover hunk of beef last night to stretch between two grown women with fairly healthy appetites, I started making bolognese, changed my mind and wanted bourgignon, and changed it back again halfway through. This is my first dinner cooked for Someone Very Special (who doesn’t like white chocolate, so Headrush Spaghetti was out, and who cooked for […]
It’s just a matter of days until my book launch on the 27th, so I’ve decided to blog one of my favourites from the book, featured in last weekend’s edition of the Observer Food Monthly magazine… First up, Chocolate, Chilli And Black Bean Soup. Photography by Susan Bell. I knocked up this soup last winter. It combines onions and garlic for detoxifying goodness […]
Based on my original Feisty Soup recipe, I’ve made myself a batch of this this afternoon to try to combat a very heavy cold. It normally works very well; the chilli blasts the sinuses, the lemon and ginger eases that accompanying stomach ache, the onion and garlic are packed with antioxidants and the carrots and tomatoes deliver a hefty dose of vitamin C… I’d rather have this than Lemsip any day. Ingredients (Makes 4-6 portions) 1 onion 2 cloves of garlic 1 teaspoon ground ginger or 1cm fresh 1 tbsp lemon juice 200g sliced carrots 800g chopped tomatoes with juice 300ml chicken or vegetable stock Pinch of dried chilli or 1 fresh chilli Peel and chop the onion, garlic, chilli and ginger and add to a large saucepan with the lemon juice. Cook together on a low heat, stirring frequently to disturb and stop them from sticking. When the onion has started to soften, add the tomatoes and drained carrots, and pour the stock over the top. Simmer for 10 minutes to combine the flavours and heat through. Remove from heat, and blend using a hand blender or jug blender. Serve hot! Jack Monroe. Twitter: @MsJackMonroe. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/agirlcalledjack
How times change. I just found one of my old notebooks – back from even I had a decent, well-paying job in the 999 control room at the Fire Service – that I used to write my recipes down in. There’s 14 of these in total, and I have most of them in grabbing distance, but this one was unearthed […]
This recipe uses tinned chickpeas, but can also use dried chickpeas if you have them available. Dried chickpeas work out cheaper but will need to be soaked in cold water for at least 8 hours before starting the recipe, and then need to be cooked (put in a pan, cover with water and boil vigorously for at least 10 minutes […]
This is so simple that I feel cheeky calling it a recipe, but it’s one for all those folks that say to me, ‘Oh I’d love to make soup but I don’t know where to start.’ well, start here and see where it takes you. There’s even some chopping of vegetables involved, so brace yourselves. Tinned soup contains among other […]
There are many different recipes entitled Love Soup – I’ve seen some rich chicken soup recipes, some with heady garlic and some deep red tomato ones. By chance, the ingredients for this were what I had kicking around in the fridge last Valentines Day, so this warming carrot, ginger and onion soup is mine. Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite […]
COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP 