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

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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. The award-winning author’s debut was named Most Sustainable Cookbook in 2020 at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. He also helmed BBC Earth’s 2020 Regeneration Food series which showcased how businesses, organisations and leaders are wasting less to reduce their carbon footprint.

Tik Tok sustainability star Martyn – AKA The Waste Disruptor – is a London-based developmental chef whose fun, infectious online videos teach wannabe cooks how to create less food waste, reduce impact on the planet and save pennies in the process. She has been in recovery for about 18 months, and tries to go to 12-step meetings every day. “One of the things about being in recovery is you sit down and assess your life. You do what we call a moral inventory. You go over five years at a time, and identify things you’ve done, things other people have done, and you look for the clues.” What has she discovered about herself? “From a very young age I’ve had a self-destruct button.” I got really depressed and had severe anorexia. My parents said, ‘You need to start eating otherwise you’re going to die’ Have you started yet? “Oh my good God, Simon, it’s absolutely relentless. It’s like a hydra, you chop a head off something and five more have grown in its place. I’m like, can I just sum it up by going, ‘Sorry for everything, everyone, for ever?’” 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.” 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.”

Monroe winning the 2018 Food Personality award at the Observer Food Monthly awards, with Jay Rayner and Nigella Lawson. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian Now an award-winning cookery writer, TV presenter and campaigner against hunger in the UK, she’s penned six best-selling cookbooks, including Cooking On A Bootstrap, helping people on a budget create delicious dishes from basic store cupboard ingredients. I just wanted to put the brakes on for a bit and go, right, I’m going to work normal human hours, spend some quality time with my son and have a quiet time,” she says. That lasted for a couple of months. “Then the cost of living crisis hit, and I did a tweet, and life went nuts.”

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.” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ 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.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).

Meanwhile, the abuse has worsened. The police, she says, have advised her to hire a bodyguard for public appearances. Online, critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is. “Yeah, it’s funny because they all want to allege that I live in this big mansion in the middle of nowhere,” she retorts. “But in the four years I’ve lived in this house [in Southend-on-Sea], probably 30 journalists have been around it, and if it did have a pool and five Jaguars on the driveway, one of them might have said something.”She tells me she woke at 6.15am, got dressed, pottered around, let the dog out, fed the cat, did all the routine things. Then she sat on her bed to put her boots on, and the next thing she remembers is waking up at 2pm. I ask why she is so exhausted. “I’ve just been overdoing it recently. Everybody’s been saying, ‘You need to slow down.’” Set design: Lisa Engel at Propped Up. Hair and makeup: Alice Theobald @Arlingtonartists using Morgan’s Pomade and Guerlain. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

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