Jack | Jack Monroe

You Don’t Batch Cook When You’re Suicidal (formerly: The Price Of Potatoes & The Value Of Compassion)

Posted by Jack | Jul 30, 2020 | Blog, Essays

Whenever food poverty, obesity, or food in general comes into the media spotlight, I adopt a mental brace position, awaiting the onslaught of tweets that come, a plague of clockwork cockroaches, wound up and scurrying every which way into the light. Some are clumsily well-intentioned, most are not, yet here they come with their hastily-Googled prices of spring greens and potatoes, crowing about how! cheap! vegetables! are! The latest was Annunziata Rees-Mogg, MEP and sister of that sentient haunted Victorian coat rack, Jacob Rees-Mogg, pointing out that raw potatoes were cheaper to buy than oven chips. A 21st Century...

Zero-Waste Banana Peel Ketchup, 43p

Posted by Jack | Jun 21, 2020 | Blog, Breakfast, Dairy Free, Entertaining, Gluten Free, Healthy, Low Histamine, Lunch, Recipes, Snacks & Treats, Vegan, Vegan Recipes, Vegetarian

I first came across banana chilli ketchup while staying in a self catering apartment in Edinburgh. It takes a certain amount of planning to buy exactly enough food to sustain two adults for three days, wasting nothing, when your nearby shopping options are the Harvey Nichols food hall (ineffectual, expensive, but fun to walk around gasping at and making furtive notes at all the fancy pastas), or a Sainsbury’s Local, where fruit and veg are sold in large packets and nothing by the handful. I found a banana habanero chutney in Harvey Nicks by Mr Vikki’s, a small...

Vegan ‘Egg’, Tomato & Cress Sandwich, 68p [from ‘Veganish’]

Posted by Jack | Jun 19, 2020 | Bread, Breakfast, Dairy Free, Healthy, Lunch, Vegan, Vegan Recipes, Vegetarian

This recipe is based on my favourite ever egg sandwich – the M&S Egg, Tomato & Salad Cream – but I challenged myself to create it as a vegan version when I was writing Veganish. My readers had specifically requested sandwich recipes for this book, seemingly unanimously tired of the solitary falafel offering in the supermarket compared to the dozens of meat and cheese options. So I made a list of both my personal favourites, and asked people for theirs, and tried to recreate as many of them as possible, as closely as possible to the originals. And...

Tomato, Bread & Butter Pasta, 24p

Posted by Jack | May 5, 2020 | Blog, Dairy Free, Entertaining, Gluten Free, Lunch, Pasta, Recipes, Tomato-Free, Vegan, Vegan Recipes, Vegetarian

This pasta sauce started off as a pappa al pomodoro, but quickly veered towards a tomato butter sauce as I craved comfort on an increasingly blue day. I don’t know about you, but lockdown is playing havoc with my already unreliable emotional weather vane, clattering it all over the place, and I am learning to take things hour by hour, meal by meal, and take pleasure in moments of simple comfort in this strange new world of unknowns. I am grateful that all members of my household are healthy and well, and that we are able to do most...

Tinned Pear Cake, 36p [Tin Can Cook]

Posted by Jack | May 3, 2020 | Baking, Blog, Bread, Dairy Free, Dessert, Entertaining, Healthy, Recipes, Snacks & Treats, Vegan, Vegan Recipes, Vegetarian

This soft, sweet, rich and heavy cake was written for Tin Can Cook, as I sat surveying tins of fruit and wondering how to plump up my pudding chapter. My eyes roved greedily over the tinned peaches, pears and cherries, looking for inspiration, and there it was. Fat, fulsome pears swimming sodden in their own slippery, succulent syrup – what a treat! I could barely wait as I sat typing up the recipe, my home rich with the scent of freshly baked goods, impatiently picking at the slice I promised myself as a reward for committing it to paper....