I have made 5 recipes so far from the book and have found them to be good value, tasty and reliable. As a vegetarian I like the fact that there is quite a range of meat free options (or ones that are easily adapted). I think this is a real return to the form of her first book which is my favourite. My daughter loved the sausage curry and I particularly enjoyed the tomato, bread and butter pasta. Looking forward to trying some more recipes!

The recipes are not appealing, who wants pineapple and kidney bean curry, if I'm short on money, I want recipes my children will eat. They also aren't particularly thrifty, lots of ingredients required for each recipe, ingredients that I may not find in a food bank such as jackfruit and anchovies. Some of the tips are hair raising, if I don't have a sieve, where am I getting carabiner from? I think I'll look at returning the book and asking to swap it with a Jamie Oliver one, I can trust his recipes or Tom Kerridge, especially after all his hard work with Marcus Rashford with the Full Time Meals scheme

It’s a common theme in Thrifty Kitchen; Monroe adapts a recipe found easily online but in the process of making it ‘her own’ she often removes ingredients that make the thing worth the effort of cooking. Her signature recipe for roast chicken it to put it in a roasting tin, use salt and pepper and cook as per packet. Another ‘thrifty’ recipe tells you to cook tinned butter beans (which are already cooked) for 40 mins. Every recipe has either quantities missing (generous this, generous that, plenty of this etc etc) or steps in the process are missing.