Cook on a budget
Ella Walker meets Miguel Barclay, a man on a mission to make food cheap and simple.
ARGUABLY, cooking isn’t a game. We’ve all got to eat, right? Being able to chuck stuff in a pan, heat it up and feed ourselves is a necessity, not a hobby. And 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 - and is now on his third cookbook, Super Easy One Pound Meals, full of one-pot dinners.
Cooking and food shopping can become a ‘game’
“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. My mates used to come round, so there’d be a cold lasagne, a cold cottage pie...” Six years later, he started putting his recipes on Instagram (and now has 228,000 followers and counting) and got a book deal. “That’s all I do now,” he 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.” And 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.
Waitrose, Lidl and Sainsbury’s are all fair game - Miguel doesn’t discriminate
Surprisingly, he doesn’t find himself restricted by supermarkets. “I treat them all equally, and it’s fun,” he says. 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.” Recalibrating how you shop and how you think about nabbing a bargain, he says, can contribute massively to cutting down how much food you chuck away. “You can get a big bag of peppers for cheaper than one pepper, but if you’re not going to use them all and throw half of them away, then actually, they’re double the price per pepper than you thought you were spending,” he says pragmatically. “It’s about knowing what you want before you get there.” 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.
Why he’s proud to be an ‘anti-chef’
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. Take his attitude towards parmesan cheese: “Some people are like, if it hasn’t been aged for X number of years, don’t buy it - but I can’t really spend £7 on a wedge of parmesan.” He’s much more interested in making food that you can stick in the oven and then go watch some TV, than inventing foams and putting salmon in a sous vide. “I’m never preaching or making people feel foolish or inadequate, I’m just showing them what I do,” he says humbly. 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.