Delicious dinners that won’t cost you a packet
ELLA WALKER meets the man on a mission to make food cheap and simple
ARGUABLY, cooking isn’t a game. We’ve all got to eat. Being able to chuck stuff in a pan, heat it up and feed ourselves is a necessity, not a hobby. Preferably, what we cook shouldn’t bankrupt us, but food prices are rising, and if your culinary skills are limited, reaching for ready meals can be pretty costly.
Enter Miguel Barclay. The ex-biochemist jacked in a job in e-commerce to cook – and to only cook meals that come in under a stringent, self-imposed budget of £1 per portion. He is now on his third cookbook, Super Easy One Pound Meals, full of one-pot dinners.
“It started with opening the fridge to see what there is, like (TV show) Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook, but it wasn’t as fun as, ‘What can I cook for £1?”’ he explains. “I’m quite scientifically minded. I like spreadsheets and calculating stuff, so it was the perfect game.”
Based in London, he’d “skive” off from his office job as much as possible, spend a tenner in the supermarket and cook all afternoon, “then just eat cold food later when we got back from the pub.”
Six years later, he started putting his recipes on Instagram (and now has 232k followers and counting) and got a book deal.
“That’s all I do now,” Miguel says bemusedly, “play this game every day.”
Calling cooking on a budget a ‘game’, when admittedly he’s not struggling to pay for groceries, could look insensitive, but Miguel sees what he does as “a puzzle or an equation – it’s a bit like sudoku, but more hands-on”.
He wants people to benefit from his solutions/recipes, whether it helps them get to grips with food shopping or budgeting, be less daunted by cooking, or just encourages them to be more inventive in the kitchen.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t find himself restricted by supermarkets. You’re as likely to find him in Lidl (although he thinks there’s too much of a queue) as you are Waitrose (he’s a fan of their essentials range Arborio rice).
In Miguel’s world, food waste is also a “fun” conundrum, because “it’s an even more complicated equation to solve”.
“Using up all the ingredients, it’s really like a jigsaw. I’m not on a crusade to stop people wasting food, but I like the problem solving of how not to waste food.”
If you really want to save money, he says, planning ahead is a must. “You’ve got to plan what you’re going to eat and overlap ingredients every day,” so the mince leftover from your Bolognese on Monday, doesn’t go in the bin on Wednesday because you didn’t think of a way to use it up on Tuesday.
Miguel, who first got interested in cooking as a pot washer while a student, considers Jamie Oliver his biggest inspiration, but also calls himself an “anti-chef ”.
With no formal culinary education and a food career built on kitchen shortcuts (his couscous paella earned him a lot of online abuse: “Even my Spanish nan was like, ‘That’s not paella, that’s rice with stuff in it’,”), you can see why.
However, he thinks that’s why One Pound Meals has been such a success – he’s got no fancy chef airs and graces getting in the way. “It’s like the art world, you’ve got to be pretentious to be believed to be the best, and that’s not me.”
For his next book, Miguel’s hoping to compile a collection of £1 veggie and vegan meals, and no, he’s not tempted to experiment with 50p dinners.
“£1 gives me the flexibility to use some cool stuff, I don’t want to do a cookbook that’s just lentils,” he says with a grin.
■ Miguel Barclay’s Super Easy One Pound Meals by Miguel Barclay, photography by Dan Jones, is published by Headline Home, priced £16.99.