save with jamie

Muzikmaster

I bought the book yesterday from Sainsburys (cheapest price I could find). I'm really impressed with it's content. Yesterday I tried a cous cous salad with veg' and feta balls in sesame seeds and it was really tasty. I'm trying a chicken liver Bolognese from it tomorrow night so I will let you all know how it goes.

I did also buy a digital copy of the new Gordon Ramsey book and I can tell you I aint too impressed with that really.

Fen1

Quite a lot of people do not know how to price things per kilo. They see the price on the label, but don't do the maths to work out what is actually cheaper.
It gets particularly confusing if things are on different types of offers e.g. 3-4-2, 30% off, BOGOF. The big 'value' packs are not always the cheapest.

Craftyblue

I also work in a library and whilst I think it's good that the book has been donated, I'm not sure it's going to do much for the people that really need help. I am cover for 16 different libraries in the city where I live and we are often sent from the poorest area to the most affluent in the space of a day, it's a real eye opener. In the poorer areas people do come into the library, but we had Jamie's book on display yesterday and nobody there even glanced at it. In contrast the library I was working at today is in a very wealthy area and there was a lot of interest. We already had several reservations and it's only been out for two days.

Having looked through it, I agree with other posters that their are some good recipes and it's nice to see some that aren't quite so complicated and have lots of herbs and spices included, which I think puts some people off. Essentially this book is a good way for people with money to save money. For those living on next to nothing, this book has very little to offer.

I would say though that Jamie seems like a nice chap and a very good chef. It's clear that he cares about the different causes he supports, I'm just not sure he's hit the mark with this one.

recovering_spendaholic

I like watching Jamie Oliver but I do think that his obsession with "poor people" eating bad food and buying big screen TV's is rather patronising.

I think there is a middle ground and people who live mainly on takeaway food and ready meals are not suddenly going to have some kind of epiphany and start cooking with ingredients they don't know.

When I was young we had very little money and I think that Jamie should be steering people to making the kind of staples that I was brought up on and stop banging on about buying organic chicken and using stuff like red chard and caballonero or whatever. I think he needs to be steering people to stuff like mince and potatoes, stews, ribs, and simple things like that. That's just my opinion though...

Dunroamin

tessie_bear wrote: »

i plan to join the queue at the libary to have a look but might buy it if it looks any good...i got the impression from the one show that he is using the economy gastronomy approach of cooking a big bit of meat and rehashing the leftovers...not summat my kids are very keen on so might not be able to use much of it

How would they know?

Butterfly_Brain

I find JO has turned into a sanctimonious prat. I could teach him a thing or three of how to cook on a budget. He is using chicken livers which are both tasty and cheap at 50p a pot, but because he has used them in his cheffy weffy book the price will double in no time, this is what has happened to many of what used to be cheap cuts of meat, such as oxtail, shin of beef, neck of lamb, breast of lamb etc that have had the cheffy weffy touch.
What angers me most is that he says that this is aimed at those on benefits or low wages, what he fails to grasp is that buying a whole salmon would wipe out most of the weekly food budget in one hit.

ditsykitchen

recovering_spendaholic wrote: »

I like watching Jamie Oliver but I do think that his obsession with "poor people" eating bad food and buying big screen TV's is rather patronising.

I think there is a middle ground and people who live mainly on takeaway food and ready meals are not suddenly going to have some kind of epiphany and start cooking with ingredients they don't know.

When I was young we had very little money and I think that Jamie should be steering people to making the kind of staples that I was brought up on and stop banging on about buying organic chicken and using stuff like red chard and caballonero or whatever. I think he needs to be steering people to stuff like mince and potatoes, stews, ribs, and simple things like that. That's just my opinion though...

I moved out of my parental home in 2010. I was brought up on ready meals and rubbish and only liked frozen pizzas, pasta with ragu jar sauce and cheese sandwiches. I had never cooked a meal in my life. I had an epiphany and I would say it was definitely thanks to chefs like jamie. I realised it wasn't how I wanted to live. He is 'banging on' about buying organic chicken because buying battery farmed animals is simply cruel. If someone can't afford higher welfare meat they should consider eating less meat. I don't really know what's wrong with him cooking more interesting meals than mince and potatoes. There's a million recipes out there for these things and his job as a food writer is to stand out and produce something new and exciting to inspire people.

ditsykitchen

Sorry if that sounded a bit harsh. We do live just above the poverty line, so I get frustrated when I see people on incomes around ours and often greater complaining of not being able to afford to cook. At the end of the day though, I love cooking, so I guess it all depends on your priorities.

Almo

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

I find JO has turned into a sanctimonious prat. I could teach him a thing or three of how to cook on a budget. He is using chicken livers which are both tasty and cheap at 50p a pot, but because he has used them in his cheffy weffy book the price will double in no time, this is what has happened to many of what used to be cheap cuts of meat, such as oxtail, shin of beef, neck of lamb, breast of lamb etc that have had the cheffy weffy touch.

But the alternative is that he doesn't tell people about these cheap and tasty alternatives in which case he'd get lambasted for only using poncy cuts that normal people can't afford. Seems to be a lose-lose situation.

---

I think the problem is that MSE is a self selecting group of people trying to get the best value for their money, and very often trying to spend as little as possible. OS is a further self selecting group of people who either can cook or are at least interested in learning to cook. Of course things like JO's book, economy gastronomy and superscrimpers are not that much use for people here, they already know the skills, and more, but there are plenty of people out there who don't.

Sure, there are cheaper and probably better ways to eat than those promoted on these shows but for people who can't/won't cook, surely it's better to start in a sort of middle ground and get them used to making real food. Refining those skills to lower the budget comes later (unless people are in dire straits, of course).

The other point to make is that JO is a big commercial brand nowadays (well, for a long time) and his books and tv shows are tapping into the current economic and social situation to make a profit. That may be unpalatable in many ways but they need to be commercially viable and frankly they need to make good tv. That probably doesn't go hand in hand with reaching the people who need those skills most but it is the reality.

richardw

Some of the recipes may end up on the ch4 website after the programme http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes

and of course this is nothing new, Delia did it years Ok http://www.deliaonline.com/news-and-features/frugal-food-2012.html published when JO was a toddler.

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=10177367392&cm_ven=aff&cm_ite=cj&cm_cat=sws&cm_pla=sws&afn_sr=CJ