Jack had £10 to spend on food and cooked herself up a fortune

Jack Munroe looked at her hungry son and then to the items she’d bought with her paltry £10 weekly food budget.

Forced to give up her job and unable to find another, she was deep in poverty. But with a two-year-old to feed, single mum Jack had to find a way to make the food and her £10 note stretch. She’d spend an age in supermarkets searching for bargains.

If the reduced section didn’t produce any gems, then a selection of own-brand tins would have to do. Cheap tinned tomatoes, potatoes and baked beans, which she’d use to fill out meals after washing off the tomato sauce, became staples of her diet.

By adding equal measures imagination and desperation, she began concocting all manner of hearty and posh-sounding meals that often cost less than a pound.

Carrot and coriander falafels made for 23p, Gigantes Plaki for 17p and carrot, cumin and kidney bean burgers made for just 9p. This was haute cuisine budget style.

“I’d always enjoyed cooking but what I was doing was born of necessity,” the 25-year-old said. “I tried to buy ingredients that would allow me to make decent meals.

“I take recipes from celebrity chefs’ cookbooks, like Gordon Ramsay and Nigella Lawson and strip the ingredients right back.”

The result was recipes like Mumma Jack’s Best-Ever Chilli, a variation of a Ramsay recipe where beans replaced beef and which cost just 30p to make.

Jack realised she couldn’t be the only one having to live like this, so began to post the recipes on her blog, which she’d previously set up to write about local politics, in the hope it would help others. Word spread and she became an internet sensation.

Two years on, Jack is debt-free and has released a cookbook featuring 100 of those budget recipes.

She’s also a charity campaigner, food journalist and has been the face of a Sainsbury’s ad campaign.

The remarkable upswing in her fortunes sounds like the plot of a movie. Hollywood agreed just last month the producer of Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street offered her big bucks for her life story, but she knocked it back.

Sharing her darkest days with the Sunday Post, Jack explained: “I’ve always worked but when I had Jonny I could no longer do night shift. I applied for other roles and asked for different hours, without success. In the end I’d no choice but to resign.”

Unable to find a job, Jack sold everything she owned to pay off her rent arrears and moved to a smaller flat. She was also forced to queue at her local foodbank.

The interest led to media coverage and soon Jack was being referred to as the “face of modern poverty”. She was even invited to speak in parliament and to attend the G8 summit.

Now spending an extra fiver a week on food, Jack who’ll speak at Glasgow’s Aye Write literary festival next month said: “I’ve learned life is stranger than fiction and you have to take opportunities.”

A Girl Called Jack is out now on Penguin.