How blogging about my £10 a week food shop helped me cope with life

I'm a girl called Jack. The "£10 a week food shop" girl. The single mummy blogger. I started to cook for myself and my three-year-old son on an extremely low budget last summer, because the £6 in change I scraped from corners of drawers, coat pockets and my son's money box was all I had to work with.

I had been unemployed since November 2011, and the transition from employed status to job seeking, the delays in housing benefit payments, had left me in rent arrears. Eventually I had to sell everything in my home in a one-day sale to try to clear my debts and get back on my feet.

I wrote on my blog back in July 2012, in a post titled Hunger Hurts, that poverty isn't just having no heating, unplugging your fridge, or unscrewing the light bulbs. Poverty is that sinking, choking feeling when your two-year-old finishes his one Weetabix, mashed with a little water, and says: "Can I have some more please, Mummy? Some bread and jam please?" And you break down in tears, because you don't know how you'll carry the TV and the guitar to the pawn shop, and how to tell him that there is no bread and jam.

With that £6, I went to the supermarket, determined to stop skipping meals. I needed to eat as well as I possibly could, and start to think about myself again. I picked up a can of chopped tomatoes, a bag of carrots, parsnips, potatoes and onions for £1, a can of kidney beans, a bag of rice, a bag of pasta, and some dried herbs, vegetable stock cubes and dark chocolate to make things a bit more interesting. Back home, I put it on the worktop, and started to work out my meals. A carrot and kidney bean soup doubled up as a pasta sauce, and eventually the 9p carrot, cumin and kidney bean burger. I made tomato and bean soup, tomato and onion pasta sauce, and a basic chilli, and I made it through the week.

A few months later, I was referred to my local food bank for help by my Sure Start's children's centre. Supplementing my weekly food shop, which came in at around £10 a week, with five items handed out from the food bank, was a godsend. I began to write more recipes, posting them on my blog. The response was incredible. Families, students, people on benefits or struggling financially said how much it helped to see recipes made using value and basic ranges from supermarkets.

There was also criticism. People called my costings disingenuous, because "you can't buy half an onion". I've lost count of the times I've explained that I'll use one half for lunch in a soup, and the other half in dinner, or double the quantities of the recipe and freeze the leftovers. Then there's the £3.48 bottle of red wine I put in my casseroles and soups and risottos. Apparently, someone as hard up as I was shouldn't be buying £3.48 wine. Not even when I put a stopper in it and that bottle lasts well over a month. Apparently, that's extravagant.

I've never sold it as an ideal life – simply how I coped with mine. I couldn't have carried on, skipping dinner to feed my son, and feeding him cereal with water and cold pasta in the evenings. Something had to change, so I changed it, and I wrote about it.

Life has taken unexpected turns. I have spoken in Parliament on food poverty, attended the G8 summit as part of the Enough Food If campaign, and been interviewed for an Oxfam report on food banks. Penguin has signed me to write a cookery book.

When the first third of my cookbook advance hits my bank, it has already been mentally allocated to paying off rent arrears, nursery fees fallen behind on, and outstanding utility bills, which doesn't leave much left. But for the first night in almost two years, I will go to bed without the worry of debts, bailiffs, final demands and court summons. True, I will go to bed in the one bedroom that I share with my son in a house with five other people – but that one bedroom is safe.

People ask if I will still live on such a tight budget now that I have a cookbook deal and a job. Yes, I will. Because two years ago, I had a £27,000-a-year job and a beautiful home, and I could never have imagined life falling apart as much as it did – and I'll be damned if I'll ever go through that again.

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