Tin Can Cook: 75 Simple Store-cupboard Recipes

I've got all of Jack Monroe's cookery books, and this one was much awaited. It hasn't disappointed. 'Tin Can Cook's' premise is a simple one - all of these recipes use tinned or dry food (pasta, flour, lentils) , as supplied by food banks. As you might imaging from the title, the emphasis is on tinned food. Many of us living on limited budgets are also aware of the value of tins. Beans on toast can be prepared as quickly as any ready meal, and so can the equally cheap sardine rilletes - and have you ever tried cooking pasta in a mug? The instructions are here. There are some very original ideas for using tinned chicken in white sauce. This could be easily replaced by cooked chicken in those recipes where the sauce isn't essential, for those who don't want to buy a tin. I'd already tried earlier versions of some of these recipes, and I can vouch that they work. I'm looking forward to trying the latest version of Creamy Salmon/Crabby Pasta, which involves milk, rather than yogurt (I've usually used quark, as it's less likely to split than yogurt when heated, but it's also more expensive). Jack is famous for her bread recipes, and there's even one of those for Pina Colada Bread, involving pineapple and coconut milk. The chief focus is on mains, but there are puddings and soups too, many of the soups, such as a salmon chowder, being meals in themselves. By using pre-cooked tinned products many of the recipes are very economical on fuel too - there are plenty of one pot recipes that can be cooked on a hob. There are plenty of vegetarian and vegan recipes, but the meat and fish sections are pretty generous too, This book doesn't have colour photographs, and it is a smaller format than Jack's other books. Which means it takes up less room on the kitchen bookshelf. There are some line drawings to liven the pages. There's also a really good introduction, and extensive nutritional information as a forward, Jack really does do her homework. Opened flat, this book is the same size as a sheet of A4 paper - Jack has already given her permission for these recipes to be photocopied by food banks. You don't have to be a food bank user to find this of value - it will make a great addition to the bookshelf of any keen cook on a budget, or indeed, anyone who likes the idea of using more recycleable packaging, and less in the way of ready meals. Another book of Jack's that is quickly going to find its pages stained, and looking dog eared from being turned down to mark a page, I feel. Finally, Jack mentions in her introduction that the late food writer Shirley Goode was a little disparaging of her first book, remarking that 'cooking with yoghurt and a jar of fish paste doesn't take any particular skill'. (It does, actually, to stop the yoghurt from splitting, but never mind..) Anyway, this is an excerpt from Shirley's very last blog entry. "The gardener is here today, and am having home helpers twice a week, so plenty of people around. And guess what!!! The local organiser for the latter is the cousin of Jack Monroe - small world isn't it?" I think Jack won Shirley over, don't you? She would have liked this book too, I am sure.

I received mine today and have been looking forward to this for weeks! Luckily it arrived before lunch so I went straight to the storecupboard to try out one of the soups. More on that later. First a super quick overview: At a glance: * 75 Recipes in total, including soups, mains, breakfasts, and desserts. * Includes 25 Vegan Recipes, plus a further 12 Vegetarian, if my counting is right. Plus a few non-veggie ones can be converted to meat-free or vegan. * All easy to follow. * Some require a blender. * Doesn't say how long each recipe takes (you have to add it up yourself). * No photos. * Lots of space for your own notes. My first impressions: 1) It's smaller (as in not as tall and wide) than most of my other recipe books. This makes it perfect for actually flicking through and reading. You don't need to lay it on a table to read it, and you can actually hold it open with one hand. Unlike my huge hardback recipe books which are so unwieldy. This book is super-wieldy. 2) No photos and non-glossy pages. I think this was a deliberate choice to keep the price down, which makes sense. Still, it does mean I'll have to keep it clear of dripping spatulas as the pages won't wipe clean. Or maybe I'll let the book get mucky anyway, building up a proud patina of tomato-juice splashes as time goes on. On to second impressions. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case the soup. The recipe was easy to follow and didn't surprise me halfway through like so many recipes do. You know the ones, where you've just followed steps 1-3 and then step 4 suddenly announces that you should have been preparing something else during step 2. They usually start with that insidious word "meanwhile". Personally I feel that I shouldn't have to read a recipe twice and re-arrange the steps before starting to follow it! None of that nonsense here, just follow the steps and out comes dinner. Love it. The soup itself came out *really* thick, maybe because I used basmati rice instead of plain white? Update: did it again today with no rice at all and it's transformed it from an OK soup to a fantastic one. Flicking through the rest of the book it looks like all the recipes are sensibly laid out and portioned, accompanied by a few paragraphs explaining the origin of the recipe (most of the recipes only have 1 or 2 paragraphs, the soup I chose today has one of the longest 'stories' of all). They are all marked as to whether they are vegetarian (12 recipes at a quick count) or vegan as well (another 25). A lot of the recipes require a blender. The recipes are broken into chapters of: Breakfast and Brunch, Soups, Beans, Potatoes, Pasta, Fish, Meats, and Puddings. There's also a very humbling introduction which highlights the depressing rise of food bank usage in the UK, a section wonderfully titled 'Cansplaining' which talks about what you get in cans, and explains a little about basic nutrition, a useful index, and that's the lot. All in all, a really well thought out book that is exactly what I wanted. Perfect for setting up a proper suite of storecupboard meals.

I’m a big fan of Jack Monroe and really like this book for easy mid-week meals for minimum effort and cost. I only deducted a star as I’m veggie and found that some of the full dinner type meal recipes for veggies were a bit samey (I realise that it is probably inevitable when dealing with tinned items to be fair!). For light meals such as soups and breakfasts however the book is really inventive and already well used in our house... and I always have ‘A Girl Called Jack’ to fall back on for dinner time meals so I’m really happy with this book!

I like Jack Monroe's books and her general attitude to food and life, which is practical, positive, creative and realistic. The fundamental message is, you can eat well even if you have very little, if you use a bit of effort and imagination. I admire this very much. There are plenty of good recipes in this book, Obviously, it isn't quite haute cuisine, but then most of us don't want fancy recipes, but practical, tasty ones that we can use more than once. There are plenty of good ideas in this book and I particularly like the soup recipes and the mix of vegetarian and meat recipes. We could all do with eating more vegetarian dishes, if only for health and economy reasons, rather than out of conviction. When I first read this book, I thought the desert section was poor, but i've changed my mind. There are some really good ones. Today, I made the sticky toffee pudding from some flour and a couple of tins. It was really good! The first part of the book spends time explaining nutrition and the nutritional value of various tinned foods. I didn't need this myself, and couldn't remember it if I tried, but it is very reassuring for those forced to live out of tines because they depend on a food bank - and those of us unable to shop for fresh food during the Coronavirus outbreak. I suppose this is why, at the time of writing, I was able to buy the kindle version of this book for 99p. This is very public-spirited of Jack Monroe, another reason that I admire her. I will certainly use this cookbook, and the others of hers that I own. Most of us could do with learning how to eat healthily and well while spending less money on food. I'm looking forward to learning more!

This is a worthy attempt to get the poor to eat the food that the middle-class think they should. I believe that copies of Tin Can Cook are being handed out by food banks, but I do wonder just how many former Waitrose shoppers are so down on their luck as to need it? George Orwell made the point that the middle-class liked to tell the working-class what to eat and his answer to them was to say that if you are poor you want something a bit tasty. So strong tea with at least two heaped teaspoons of sugar in each cup and food that a man can get his teeth into. There are quite a few cookery books that understand this such as Cooking in a Bedsitter, that has now been in print for almost sixty years that would be far better for the foodbanks to dish out since their punters may be more inclined to cook those solid recipes. Likewise, the recipe books that aim to keep students alive with lots of simple, homely recipes could also be used. I just have my doubts about the utility of Tin Can Cook when it has a recipe for baked beans which involves taking a tin of baked beans, washing away their sauce and then adding a new sauce which Miss Monroe has created. Similarly, I also doubt that the poor will be all that impressed with the tiresomely large number of vegetarian recipes found in this volume. They run up against the Orwell Thesis of tasty, homely grub that poor people want to eat. So, a worthy book that will be read by the people who support foodbanks financially and shop at Waitrose. However, probably not one that will have any influence at all over its target readership who will most likely ignore it.

This book is brilliant! The majority of the recipes are easy and budget friendly. There's a couple where I think it works out cheaper just to buy a pack of mince or a pack of chicken breasts, rather than tinned stuff, but I get that the point is not everyone can access or store fresh ingredients. So for the purpose of sticking to the book I have bought tinned. I can highly recommend the coronation chicken recipe, which tastes just as good as any coronation chicken I've had anywhere. Truly yum. And we used Asda smart price tinned chicken in white sauce - the chicken chunks were huge (not that it matters in this recipe as you break them down) and the sauce was nice. This recipe calls for removing the majority of the white sauce before cooking. A bit of a pain yes, but I can see why you need to. Also we kept the excess sauce and will use it when we make the 'chicken, ham and mushrooms in a fancy hat' recipe this weekend, to make it extra saucy. The recipe that we've enjoyed least was the simple crabby pasta, which calls for using a jar of salmon paste mixed with milk to make a sauce. We found this really grainy. I don't know if it's because I bought the cheapest Asda own salmon paste, or if all salmon pastes would be the same... It wasn't horrible, just not something we'd quickly make again... However we felt it could be worked on by maybe adding some cream cheese, or blending out the paste more before adding to the onions as it advises, or something else... We're going to try again with some changes to see how we can make it work, as it is a dirt cheap recipe. The absolute best thing about this book, is not only easy to make recipes and easy to get ingredients, but it makes you think outside of the box of your normal cooking style - realising what tinned goods you could use to make other stuff. And getting us to try tins we normally wouldn't, and realising hey they're actually quite nice! We work to a very tight budget, and tend to have the same things over and over, but with this book I can now see that there's so many more meals I can do - using tins! So now we have more variety in our diet, ok yes ideally we'd rather fresh stuff more, but we're getting variety within our budget. And right now that's what matters.

Chef and writer Jack Monroe has written a book for food bank users, to create simple, delicious, nutritious meals from canned vegetables and meat, mainly cooked in one pot on a hob. I’m sure its appeal will be much wider! There are 75 recipes in this 150 page book, plus information on the nutritional content of the food in cans (‘Canspaining’). The recipes are split into sections (breakfast, soups, pasta, meat, puddings etc), and almost all recipes are quick and look very simple. Several are veggie or vegan, and as the ingredients are from cans there is no waste.. There are lots of useful hacks and tips (making chilli oil in a blender, cooking pasta in tinned soup), which makes it both incredibly inventive and fun, and perfect for less experienced cooks including kids and students.

I had come across this author on Twitter, so I decided to treat myself to a recipe book... I have bought a few recipe books in the past, but I have probably only ever made one recipe from each book, simply because of time, and also sourcing the ingredients (my closest supermarket is a small also so they don't have much). my cooking skills are very basic and normally involves a jar of sauce, chicken and then some type of carb. this book has been a bit of a game changer for me and I have already made 30 of the 75 recipes, simply because you can add your own stuff to it and the recipes are extremely easy to follow and you can change them around to suit your favourite flavours. I don’t understand why people are mean about this author as she seriously has helped me so much just from this one book! I would recommend it to anyone who is really on the budget or a student who has no idea on where to start when it comes to cooking. some recipes are very basic, but like I have previously said you can then add ingredients to make it more suited to yourself. i’m so happy that this week I have managed to have a different type of meal every single day!