It has taken me this long to realise that Jack has muddied the waters a little with her trademarked name Cooking on a Bootstrap. Whether on purpose or not who knows?
I have done a little preliminary research and the original phrase is of course 'cooking on or living on a shoestring' which as the name suggests means living on a very limited or restricted budget. Of course 'on a shoestring' might be copyrighted already.
Bootstrap comes from what is now a much more loaded phrase (pull oneself up by one's bootstraps) that has racist connotations these days. 'Anything is possible if you just pull yourself together' ignoring any class, race, social movement, education, financial or elitist restrictions which ensure that poor, working class and BAME people remain at the bottom of the pile.
Interestingly the bootstrap phrase originates in 1834 and referred to a person attempting an impossible task (like making Jack's food look edible) and was in turn inspired by an incident in the fantasy fiction book The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen by Rudolf Raspe (1781). The eponymous hero pulls himself and his horse of a swamp by pulling himself up by his hair. Of course it is ludicrous and suggests the impossible (again see Jack's cooking).
It took less than 10 minutes for me to discover this and I find it intriguing that Jack either does not know or care about how offensive the bootstrap reference can be.
Also the concept is alien to her, she landed on her feet and has been happily using the system to get ahead ever since. No pulling of bootstraps by Jack, not even the pulling of a pair of £180 trainer laces got her where she is today. Her class, her ethnicity, the people she knows haven't prevented her success, one might even say it all helped....