Thrifty Kitchen: Over 120 Delicious, Money-saving Recipes and Home Hacks

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Monroe is the anti-poverty campaigner and food writer who kept herself going by making the most of her pennies. She showed us how to survive in the age of austerity by being frugal in the extreme – making meals for 30p, and reusing every leftover. But I’m about to find out that it wasn’t as straightforward as that. In 2021, she finally took herself to rehab. At the time she was engaged to Louisa Compton, Channel 4’s head of news. They were both saving for their wedding. She used the money she had saved to pay for her treatment, and soon after she finished rehab, they split up. Despite her success, Monroe continued to plead poverty. Her critics started to dig deeper. Hold on, they would harrumph, she describes herself as a working-class kid with four and a half GCSEs (the half was for taking the short course in RE rather than the full GCSE), but when she first emerged she said she was middle-class and had had a good education. They pored over datelines for inconsistencies, pointing out that she said she had spent one Christmas freezing in the dark, without heating and light, but just a few weeks earlier she had invited people to come round for cake. And on it went.

It was when she was training to transfer from the control room to become a firefighter that she became pregnant with her son, who is now 12. She found the shift work was incompatible with motherhood. Her union rep told her she would probably win at an employment tribunal because she had not been offered flexible working, but Monroe decided to walk away from her decently paid job without a fuss. “It’s ironic, because I said, ‘Don’t pursue it because I don’t want to end up in the papers.’ I didn’t want the attention.” For her first year at grammar school, she was top-of-the-class swotty. “Everyone thought I was going to get 15 A* GCSEs and be a doctor.” At 12, she crashed. “I got really depressed and had severe anorexia. I stopped trying at school. My parents said, ‘You need to start eating otherwise you’re going to die.’” She sends me a photo of herself from that period in which she looks skeletal. Besides, Monroe’s books are not really for working-class people. They’re mainly for the righteous well-off who love the idea of making carrot, cumin and kidney-bean burgers with basic ingredients. You’re far more likely to spy a Monroe book – with their well-lit, hip-kitchen, knowingly austere vibe – on a Heal’s coffee table in a high-earning household than in the chaotic kitchen of a single mum who knows very well how to feed her four kids, thank you. The suggestion that Monroe is a kind of poverty performer for the posh was raised by a Guardian article about her at the weekend. It featured her lying in a bathtub of pennies. Seriously. A media luvvie photographed in a pool of pennies by other media luvvies, to raise awareness about how few pennies the poor have – they’re just taking the piss now. Set design: Lisa Engel at Propped Up. Hair and makeup: Alice Theobald @Arlingtonartists using Morgan’s Pomade and Guerlain. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

Easily, she says. Freelance life is precarious. “I’ll get a good job, a good contract, but I don’t know when the next thing is so I don’t know how long I’ve got to spread that for. It’s all right now. I’m not poor.” She is still hoping to buy her first home in the near future.

Monroe winning the 2018 Food Personality award at the Observer Food Monthly awards, with Jay Rayner and Nigella Lawson. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian Up to using a small knife and a mallet to open a tin instead of buying a 60p tin opener or borrowing a tin opener or making sure your cans have ring pulls etc. How many people in poverty with low funds are going to buy 14 ingredients, one of which is garlic bread and risk those ingredients on an untested recipe? I'd wager, none. They'd be better off buying the garlic bread, eating the garlic bread with a tin of vegetable soup. Cheaper, more nutritious, less cook time etc. Monroe decided to flog pretty much everything she owned to pay for her rent. She waited until her parents were away, then put a notice in the local paper. It ended up running a story about her and, unsurprisingly, her parents found out. “They were really upset. They came round with two Sainsbury’s bags for life. It was like Christmas. All this stuff that we hadn’t had for ages. There was a box of Coco Pops! I sat there like a child and ate bowl after bowl.” However, having such a simple meal made me feel a bit nervous. How on earth can you make a risotto without frying up a soffritto (chopped carrots, onions and celery) – or at the very least, softening some onions first to boost the flavour?

Prudence Wade tried: Risotto with peas and lettuce

Featuring everything from warming curries and a hearty pie to tasty sauces and indulgent puds, this must-have cookbook shows how easy it can be to turn basic ingredients into nourishing, mouth-watering meals that you and your wallet will love. A month later, Monroe was in the news again, after celebrating the return of more budget items to her local branch of Asda. (Asda said they had “taken onboard” Monroe’s comments and were making their cheaper lines more available). Now, as winter draws in, the 34-year-old is busier than ever, fielding interview requests to debate the cost of living crisis and dish out advice. Alongside her activism, she is still writing cookbooks (the next one, her seventh, is Thrifty Kitchen, published in January). I’m a big fritter fan generally, so this leftover-loving dish appeals massively to me. It’s quite simple to prep – I just gathered my carrot peel, threw in some other root veg (parsnip, beetroot, sweet potato and potato), after spending a good while grating everything – mixed it all up with an egg, some flour and cheddar and then attempted the patties. People say you’ve taken money, I start to say. “Yes: ‘She’s a fraud, she’s a liar, a thief, a chancer.’ I’ve heard it all.” How do you answer that – you don’t seem like a fraud to me, but it does look as if you’ve taken a lot of money. “I’ve been an absolute chaos. I’ve been very ill, physically and mentally.” ingredients in this, but that's besides the point, the instructions have you simmering this dish for almost an hour. The cost of the ingredients pales in comparison to the costs these days of simmering for almost an hour.