To think that Jamie Oliver is a Goady goady mc judgy pants personified!

[LEMisdisappointed]

judgey much?

It reads like a clip from the daily mail - actually, it probably is!

Now there are people, i have a friend who can make an amazing meal out of apparently nothing (she is italian though!) in ten minutes flat - although she has lots of those ingredients that are expensive to buy in the first place but go a long way,i would never know what to do with them!

I am such a boring cook, i have a small repertoire (sp) of meals that i cook - over and over again, the ingredients in my cupboard are basic because i can't afford capers and porcinni mushrooms etc. I rarely fall back on ready meals and feed my family healthily. But its boring really and i can understand why some people use ready meals - time, money - So yeah, making your own pizza will be cheaper than dominos or tesco fineset but it is not going to be cheaper than icelands £1 pizza is it? Not from scratch, not from the start - yes if you divide the amount of pizzas your flour, cheese, tomato sauce and anything else you want to put on it by 20 it might be cheaper but those ingredients have to be bought in the first place.

See, I would welcome cheap and easy ways to make my meals more exciting and thankfully we are not on the breadline this month, but im not going to watch that smug little bastard telling me how i can just knock out some pucker tucker out of a packet of anchovies and dust from the cupboard!

I have always thought him a smug twat - this confirms it!

I like JO and think he is right about loads of people not being able to cook. Also, having just spent a month in Italy, there are no ready meals on the shelf, you have to make everything from scratch except meat stuffed olives. The difference in supermarkets in the two countries is marked.

Quite.

He'd be better off campaigning for things like allotments or gardens. We used to have a friend with a zero hour contract and a son, who struggled when she had no hours as DWP could take months to sort her money. My dad works in a sausage factory so we get those for free and would give her bags for freezer; she would buy cheap cheap veg in bulk from markets at the close of business and give any over to us for jam making / chutney etc.

Choice wasn't an issue: she ate what she could get.

I'm speaking in the past tense as she had to give up and send her beloved child abroad to live with his dad as she could not keep managing on such an insecure income which was a terribly sad, if understandable, thing, and she now sees him twice a year if she can save enough for air fares.

Perhaps if JO cared so much benefit insecurity would be a better placed campaign? Food banks? not so much in it for him though.

Mussels are indeed cheap Aris and thank goodness as we love them, but how many toddlers would take a second look at them? When your money is really low the last thing you can afford is food waste, and it takes a cold person to be happy with their child getting so hungry they'd eat anything to save a few pennies.

Bit nut if you had 14 recipes that were as cheap as pasta, tomatoes and olives that is a good idea, isn't it? And pasta tomatoes and olives is a lot healthier than most ready meals. Especially very cheap ones, which seem to have very little veg in them.

Well I've ordered his book.[Blush] I thought it would be good to give to dd as she's off to uni next month. She loves cooking, but as I buy the ingredients she seems to ignore the cost of things. She won't be able to do that soon so I hope Jamie's book lives up to the hype.

I also think like everything else , the richer you are the cheaper and healthier life is

I applaud that post, Arisbottle.

Starfish has explained this very nicely for people who seem to have missed the point of the examples given (mussels, pasta etc.)

Here's her post:

"Those who keep banging the 'mussels' drum are missing the point, perhaps deliberately, I don't know. JO is simply saying that with three ingredients, that are cheap and accessible to you, wherever you might be, you can create a quick, healthy meal. He is simply using the Sicilian example as an illustration of how it can work because as a society they are often far better at using the fresh resources available to them than we are.

Perhaps in central suburban UK this would translate to mince, onions and potatoes. Or a bag of root veg and an onion to make a soup... The point being you can make a healthy meal out of real food, cheaply and quickly, but this is something a lot of us have forgotten how to do."

On a different note- what's up with the Huffington Press now? This, then last week the crap from that Hopkins woman about SN that spouted absolute nonsense about the SN systems.

They used to be half decent.

I know this is a bit random, but I can't be the only one who doesn't like pasta

But no doubt we'll still have another 50 posts talking about the price mussels and how you can't eat pasta every day

So Starfish what you are saying is that in effect he is trying to jump on a poverty version of Hugh''s (excellent) Three Good Things book?

Awaiting his donations of Three Cheap Things to foodbanks on a mass basis then.

NutcrackerFairy

too too true, but I have yet shared my vege minestrone recipe ! I bloody love pasta!

seriously who the fuck am I to preach, I smoke. But then I see that I am actually helping the pensions crisis in my own little way

Look, I am pretty sure that NOONE on this thread is who he speaks of, really. Rick or poor, MN dwellers are fairly educated and conscious bunch

but when I see the fried chicken joints, and what people buy at my local poundland/icelands I find it rather sad. England could do, and deserve better

and I do genuinely beleive he DOES give a shit, seriously I do. Just because he is rich does not mean he does not care

Well, that is true, Poppy. If you know some basic cooking techniques and have confidence about cooking, you can put together cheap nutritious meals eve if you don't do it every day.

But no one is going to inculcate the 'right' kind of food culture in people by making them feel like shitty failures first.

Where does JO stand on a girl called jack? Any ideas?

"I also think like everything else , the richer you are the cheaper and healthier life is

Not for sicilian fishermen, living the fucking dream they are

I think he probably does care.

Which is a shame really. If he'd teamed up with someone who at least gave him a budget and a list of common ingredients accessible to most people to work with I'm sure he could have come up with something less irritating.

I was going to say afterwards that many children won't eat mussels.

I think we need to educate ourselves about what is expensive and cheap, because it has changed. As a student I ate lots of tuna pasta becaause it is cheap, now tuna is expensive - we rarely eat it. I thought mussels were posh people's food so we didn't eat them, DD2 loves them so put them in the trolley and I was surprised at their price. I can also remember buying chicken as a student , again we rarely eat chicken because it is expensive, in fact we rarely eat meat at all.

I do think that a lot of cheap food does rely on having an overflowing store cupboard. When I visit family who are on minimum wage they do not have cupboards filled with spices, vinegars and oils - they are expensive and it is a risky investment.

I will check out the girlnamedjack blog, will come in handy thanks.

This is totally off topic but why is fish so insanely expensive? We're an island! I admit I live right in the middle of said island, but i can only buy cod, salmon, maybe some trout etc in our town. All of which is too expensive per person for us.

There must be cheaper fish we could popularise and eat.

I found some interesting looking recipes for whitebait recently - which was recommended to me due to the very high calcium content - but I can't buy it anywhere locally.

Also cannot buy chicken hearts even though there is a chicken processing plant in our town.

I am sure he does care, most people do not set out to do harm or offend. But you do lose touch when you are not having to strictly budget.

Mussels aren't cheap when you see what the bulk meat from them is in comparison to shells leftover. It is a tiny amount.

Fact is the most basic of raw ingredients are becoming terribly expensive. If you want to make a standard sponge cake, it'll take 200-250 g of butter or spread which is nearly a whole block of butter costing at least 98p (cheapest I can find ATM). Bags of flour, 3-4 eggs at nearly £2 for 6, sugar, jars of jam, all add up.

The wheat harvest failed last year so Pasta, bread will all be shooting up in price. I have been encouraging clients to stockpile whenever they see pasta on offer. Bread can be well over £1,30 a loaf for decent bread and it isn't that much cheaper to bake it when you factor in ingredients and fuel.

The price of apples is horrendous. Bananas yes are better value. Potatoes have shot up as have all other vegetables. Growing your own is an option for some but is rarely cost efficient. We have an allotment and apart from fruit, the vegetables are often grown not for money saving but for pleasure and freshness.

Dishes like risotto whilst feeding many and able to be kept cost conscious ingredient wise are costly fuel wise-twenty to thirty mins of gas/electric stove top costs these days.

The cost of ingredients to flavour home made food has gone ^. Herbs, spices, all costly. Herbs tend to be dormant in our Winters so a herb garden doesn't work so well then.

A bowl of cereal used to be the default hunger gap meal for many a poor student/child but now these cereals, even the cheaper ones are not so cheap. Eggs have shot up although if you are lucky enough to have a car you can drive to the country and buy them much cheaper. But for many that is not an option. market eggs are cheaper but as A Girl Called Jack says, we do not all have markets. My local market sells 12 eggs for £2,30. I can buy 30 eggs for £2,50 from a country stall although I leave £3,00 as I think they are worth more. An omelette will use at least 2-3 eggs, scrambled a couple. That is a lot of £££ for a family of four all wanting one of those for supper.

And treats. The poor need treats. We all need treats. But even the cost of a pack of chocolate bars is out of reach for many. Cheap home made popcorn was an answer but the cost of corn is going to ^ too.

Jamie, I could weep at your lack of understanding. Activism means being impatient w/ the system, not with those at the mercy of it.

Attack the Hedgefunders whose speculation (Let's call it gambling) on food commodities has forced up the price of wheat, cocoa, rice etc. They are disgusting and the decision to deregulate speculation on essential food crops is disgusting.

'There must be cheaper fish we could popularise and eat.'

There's loads, it's all exported to France at the moment because we're totally squeamish and suspicious of anything that isn't cod or haddock.

Yes cod is another thing that has changed price, it was cheap when I was growing up and is now prohibitively expensive - we only eat it when it is on offer. Salmon seems much cheaper, something I used to think was posh food.

Iceland's point of difference to other supermarkets is that they deliver your shopping to your home for free if you spend £25 or more - so it is bound to attract people who cannot drive (and most probably are not computer literate so don't order from anywhere else) It is true though that you can buy normal stuff from there, milk, eggs, cheese, fruit, veg (fresh and frozen) etc

Choices are limited to people in rural areas too. I was in Wales last week, you had the choice of a co-op which was very expensive or a very small iceland, that was it for MILES and MILES

Activism means being impatient w/ the system, not with those at the mercy of it

Yes!

I detect an impatience that is more about the fact JO stands to lose face after some high-profile campaigning than real concern about the people he is supposedly trying to help.

I live in Japan, so if a Japanese person walks into a shop and sees chicken fillets are half price, they can buy a pack, take them home and make something like chicken teriyaki very cheaply because almost every Japanese household with have things like soy sauce, cooking sake, mirin. All of which can be bought very cheaply and easily there. They are just paying for the half-price chicken.

For a British person, they might see a recipe for chicken teriyaki in a cook book and they have to travel miles to a speciality shop, buy all the ingredients from scratch, buy the chicken fillets full price and then they make it. It tastes good but they probably won't use a lot of the ingredients again because the only recipe they know that uses them is chicken teriyaki.

The next day the British person might look in the cookbook and decide to make madras curry. So, again to the shop, buy all the ingredients from scratch, it's a faff to cook as they are not famiiar with the techniques, but it's tastes good but they probably won't use most of the ingredients again because that is the only thing they know how to make with them.

Meanwhile the Japanese person is probably making stuff using pretty much the same ingredients every night. The person from Madras is probably using the same ingredients for every meal. They don't need a larder stocked with expensive ingredients from every corner of the world, just the same locally sourced ingredients.

A British person can buy (or grow) things like a sack of spuds, big bag of carrots, bag of onions very cheaply and make a lot of different recipes using them, casserole, soup, cottage pie, roast dinner.

If you like Italian food and cook it a lot, then it is worth investing in the ingredients to make good Italian food and as you cook it a lot it becomes easier and you can adapt recipes and feel confident making it but if you rarely eat Japanese food and are on a tight budget then it is totally wasteful to buy all the Japanese ingredients for a one off meal.

I don't think the average British person needs to buy porcini mushrooms and capers but there is an art to looking around and picking up what is in season, what is selling cheap and coming up with easy and tasty recipes that use them.