To think jack Monroes recipe book is pretty shit

[Itsgonnabeacoldone]

Secret santa present and i was interested to have a quick look through, but after 10 mins I've decided it's a waste of space and will be going to the charity shop tomorrow.

She often speaks as if she's doing charity work and helping the poorest people with these. But really who would buy it if you were that poor.

She talks about it being inexpensive as you just need a small amount of this and that but you cant just buy half a teaspoon of a spice. It might be useful if you already have the spices and end up broke, but honestly if you already have a collection of spices you are going to know how to use them.

Lots of the ingredients she says you can't buy from the local corner shop and this is where many poor people have to shop.

Some of her sage advice is to just have one type of oil and vinegar. If you are poor that's exactly what you wouldn't do - your not going to be stocking up on half a dozen different types of vinegar if you are skint. If you are not skint then why on earth would you limit the number of oils or vinegars - they are all used for different things.

I can't see who this book would help, if you have access to cheap ingredients you can make cheap food. It just comes all of as very middle class faux help.

As others have said, are you sure you are not Katie Hopkins OP? Because you sound just like her, or at the very least someone with too much time on their hands.

Many thanks to @jay95 @OVienna and @Hulder for mentioning Jack's peach and chickpea curry. I've never cooked any of Jack's recipes before. I'm not her target audience but I love trying new ideas, and I've just cooked this easy curry for lunch. And I enjoyed it a lot. I only added a few extras: a carrot, a couple of tomatoes and curry powder to the dish. A total winner. I will certainly be making it again.

I'm not her target audience

Who's that then? The poor?

I thought their target audience was people who wanted simple easy recipes that don't cost a fortune to make or require loads of ingredients. Also people in poverty who want to make their money stretch or eat more cheaply. Bit condescending to suggest jack's sole target audience is 'poor people'.

Loads of people want simple easy low stress recipes they probably already have half of the ingredients for. Also, students who don't have time or money or care about fancy gourmet meals.

Ok well I might not like jack's public persona (can't say I actually know jack!) but I really want to try the peach curry now!

Just looked this up, because I want to make it...

250g canned chickpeas (drained weight)
1 onion
1 fat clove of garlic
1 chilli
a splash of oil
1 rounded tsp cumin (ground or seeds)
1 x 400g tin of peaches (or apricots or mandarins)
1 x 400f carton or tin of chopped tomatoes
a handful of fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 stock cube, veg or chicken

First drain your chickpeas and rinse them vigorously to get rid of the stagnant water that they’ll have been sitting in. Pop them in some fresh water in a saucepan and boil rapidly for 10 minutes to soften (and get rid of any toxins…there’s differing beliefs about toxins in canned pulses and I’m of the ‘a good boil won’t hurt them’ school of thought…)

Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the onion and garlic, and chop the chilli. Pour a little oil into a medium, heavy bottomed pan, and add the onion, garlic and chilli, then the cumin, and cook gently on a low heat for a few minutes to soften the onion. Don’t be tempted to turn the heat up – burned onions will permeate your whole curry, whereas sweating them will add a delicious sweetness.

Drain the peaches, reserving the juice, and chop into small pieces. Add to the onion mixture in the pan, along with the reserved juice. By this time, the chickpeas should have finished boiling, so remove them from the heat and drain them, and tip them into the peaches-and-onion pan.

Pour the chopped tomatoes in, add the coriander, and crumble over the stock cube, then stir everything together. Reduce the heat to a low setting, and cook gently for 30 minutes. You may need to add a cup of water to the sauce if it starts to get a bit thick. Stir well, and serve.

I find it really horrible that people are actually commenting on how much money she has now. Have a word with yourselves. Why would that be an issue? It doesn't make her a bad person and she clearly still wants to give something back. I don't know much about her but I did used to read her recipes in the Guardian and I was always amazed at the creativity she put into very cheap recipes. She certainly gave me a lot of ideas about how to cook on a budget and also how to waste less food, which even people with loads of money should be thinking about as well.

Spices can be built up over time and if you buy a jar of ground cumin for 70p that is going to last for a seriously long time and add flavour into a lot of different things. The point is that a small amount of money can be spent on something that is useful for lots of meals and over a long period of time. You don't need every spice going, just a few things to add a bit of extra flavour.

LesDennishair
Why are you jumping to unwarranted conclusions? Who said anything about poor? I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, and have no plans to become one, while I believe Jack is vegan.
And if you must know, I grew up in the Soviet Union, and know perfectly well what being poor is.

I have her book...it's ok. There's a great pasta dish made using a jar of fish paste..it's surprising good!

To everyone ripping Jack and her entire life to shreds here

I'm sure none of you has ever made the slightest tiniest mistake in your perfect lives, right? What else exactly would give anyone the right to get way high up on their horses like this, judgey pants almost strangling them...

Some of you would do well to remember Jack is a real person with real feelings. How would you feel seeing every decision you made in the last ten years plus something you created to help people absolutely slagged off to high heaven? Fucks sake, mumsnet.

Who said anything about poor? I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, and have no plans to become one, while I believe Jack is vegan.

When Jack wrote A Girl Called Jack, she wasn't a vegan or vegetarian. That's why some of her recipes include fish paste, or bacon. So she wasn't aiming those recipes at vegans or veggies.

I thought that her recipes contained lots of pulses and veg simply because it's cheaper than meat. Some of them just happened to be vegetarian or vegan or could be made that way, like the chickpea and apricot curry.

My apologies sassolino

That’s right, Motoko, Jack wasn’t vegan then, and nor are all the recipes.

To all the posters throwing their books in the bin....I'd quite like to have a look at one and try the recipes so if anyone wants to sling one this way I'd happily pay the postage 😁😁

I've never read the books but always been tempted. When I see her recipes posts on twitter, they always look quite good. I should imagine some people find them helpful.

I've always been quite unconvinced with her rags to riches story though. When you look at the timeline of her life, she really wasn't poor for that long, yet she constantly bangs on about knowing poverty and living it. As someone further up thread pointed out, she has supportive middle-class parents, an involved father of her child and was 'poor' for a very short time. She has the privilege of a grammar school education, work experience and middle-class cultural capital so her constant 'I know poverty' shtick gets up my nose. I know poor. I was brought up by a working single mother who counted every last penny. There was no social mobility available for her, no career to go back to, no family nearby. Just real bleak soul-destroying life incapacitating joyless poverty with no hope of ever changing.

TBF, Thingie we don't know the ins and outs of her relationship with her parents and extended family and none of those people were under any obligation to support her.

She doesn't need to explain any estrangement or semi-estrangement to us. Such situations are delicate and private.

Man, you don't have to be in poverty for years on end to suffer when you go through it and want to help others when they're in it. If you looked at me now in a decent job on a great wage and my childhood with piano lessons in a three bedroom house you'd think i was lying saying that I had a 7-8 year long stint of earning below the min wage, went bankrupt, and had days when I couldn't afford the £7 for a prescription for antibiotics for a lung infection and couldn't miss work as I wouldn't get paid so had to keep working for a week getting increasingly sick with a developing infection until the next payday, where that £7 used to cure my infection meant I had to skip a few days food.

Stop acting sanctimonious and like you're the arbiter of whether or not someone has suffered in poverty. As I said early in the thread, I'm glad for the people who have parents who are alive and can afford to help them and are willing to do so. Not everyone has that and it's closed minded in the extreme to dismiss someone's lived experience because you don't think they should have gone through it due to their circumstances.

Thingiebob

I come from a privileged middle class background but due to illness I ended up on sickness benefits. (IB/ESA) I have been really properly grindingly poor. Counted every penny. No money to spend on treatments that I needed. Couldn't afford to buy meat, didn't go to the cinema for 10 years because I couldn't spare the money. I'm better off now, but I could go back there if my health collapsed.

How long do you have to be in it to know how fucking awful it is? I welcomed Jack's book because it would have helped me and other people, and I really appreciated what she is trying to do. At least she bothered to try to help people produce decent meals on a very small budget - have you done that?

Lemonshark

'Stop acting sanctimonious and like you're the arbiter of whether or not someone has suffered in poverty'

Funny. That's exactly how I feel about Jack Monroe.

I know she has been poor, and yes I do think her cookbooks are probably helpful to those who need them. Doesn't mean I can't find her annoying, or question her backstory. Follow her on Twitter feed. It won't take long before you see her getting into a pissing contest with someone over how much poorer she has been than everyone else.

People with privilege often fail to recognise it.

And yes I do think there is a difference between being temporarily poor as a result of your own choices with future possibilities on the horizon as opposed to being completely stuck in a poverty trap with no hope of climbing out of that pit for the rest of your life.

RidingWindHorses

I know what it is like to be long-term sick. I'm sorry. It's awful.

I find it a bit depressing that there is a market for her books. I thought it was common sense that cheap ingredients like basic veg, beans and stock cubes make an inexpensive and nutritious meal. Saying that it seems to have helped some people here so it can't be knocked for that even if it is not very original and there far better books on the subject out there. The big selling point of the book seems to be the pricing, but as many have said the costings are lies as they don't even provide enough calories for a sedentary adult.

Both Jack M and Katy H are quite similar, both used to saying outlandish things on twitter to get attention. I think what they both care about the most is advancing themselves, nothing wrong with that and its what you would expect from two people whose main job is being a media personality. The difference is Katy H I don't think even believes most of the stuff she says and deliberately dumbs herself down to appeal to the far right idiots. Jack M on the other hand isn't nearly as smart as she thinks she is and often ends up looking uninformed, one dimensional and inarticulate.

Jack M has a real branding issue. Her whole brand is based on being in poverty. But she can't seem to get past that and develop herself. The poster earlier (who could very well be her..) talks about her only being able to afford a laptop after taking very costly legal action against KH. That makes no sense. What happened to the money from national newspaper columns, best selling books and media fees? Even my 15 year old nephew managed to buy a laptop from doing a paper round. There are many flaws in her backstory that she's too eager to keep repeating and it makes her seem disingenuous. She pops up on R4 a lot talking about "just trying to pay my rent on a ramshackle home", but where has all the money gone? I know she wouldn't have made a fortune as many brands wouldn't go near her, but unless she's done something silly she's got enough that rent and food isn't a worry anymore so she should stop acting like it is. She is e-begging with a patreon account, this is usually for struggling artists not people with several best selling books, a former newspaper column, constant media appearances and a high profile.

I think she needs to develop herself and her brand to be taken seriously and stop being an uninformed one argument person. It's got stale very quickly. My advice to Jack reading this, your real story is probably about people with good jobs that are only a few months away from temporary poverty. Many people even on good wages never save and spend every penny they earn without even thinking that the money will ever stop coming in. Maybe do something to do with that rather than constantly playing poverty trump / all torys are scum on twitter.

I do think there is a difference between being temporarily poor as a result of your own choices with future possibilities on the horizon as opposed to being completely stuck in a poverty trap with no hope of climbing out of that pit for the rest of your life.

I agree. I got flamed for saying that. Big difference between having a good education, supportive parents and ex partner father during a temporary spat of no work. Big difference if you don't have any of those. I don't think it's particularly morally superior to take state money rather than ask parents for help as your too proud as you quit a well paid job with a baby and little savings. In some countries your parents income will determine your entitlement.

I can kind of see what you mean thingiebob, I think the same when someone like a politician says they’ll spend a week living in a council flat. That week gives them no fucking clue what years of poverty feels like.

But I think you have overlooked the fact that when she started her block it was because she couldn’t feed her son properly. That creates a fear that never leaves you even if it only happens once.

The chickpea and carrot burger came about because her son asked for a burger and all she had was a carrot, a tin of chickpeas and few pennies from the bottom of old handbags/behind the settee cushions.

@LikeARedBalloon most of her recipes are online - no need for the book :-)

And yes I do think there is a difference between being temporarily poor as a result of your own choices with future possibilities on the horizon as opposed to being completely stuck in a poverty trap with no hope of climbing out of that pit for the rest of your life.

I agree with this. It is totally different being long term stuck in the poverty trap, versus finding yourself poor because of childcare constraints, when you are well educated and have a good work history (and all the things that came with previously having money - like a good size fridge freezer, cooking equipment, not being on pay-as-you-go electricity supply etc).

@pingodolcepo totaly agree with your views on Jack M's on dimensional, top trumps poor persona. Great post.