From McDonalds to Instagram
Miguel Barclay talks about his transition from kitchen hand to cook
Miguel Barclay had to fake a dentist appointment to get out of work when he got his first big TV break. After his Instagram account dedicated to meals costing £1 or less went viral in 2016, Barclay was asked to appear on This Morning – so he bunked off from his nine-to-five office job to whip up chicken katsu curry live on telly for Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes.
“I turned up with pots and pans in my backpack,” Barclay recalls on a video call from his home in Camden, London, where he lives with wife Lucey and three-yearold son Charlie.
“I didn’t know if they were going to provide their own pots and pans, I’d never done it!”
He then dashed back to the office, where he would sneakily beaver away on his side hustle while pretending to work. “I used to sit at my desk and have a spreadsheet up. Obviously, if you’ve got a spreadsheet
up, everyone assumes you’re working. On the way home, I used
to buy my food, whatever the spreadsheet said, then go home and cook it,” he remembers.
A publisher offered Barclay a book deal after seeing his This Morning segment, and One Pound Meals was published in 2017. Now, the author has released seven titles in the series – but cookbooks weren’t the plan back when he started posting budget-friendly recipes online.
“I thought that I was going to create a community of people,” he says. “I wanted to challenge people to cook meals for a pound, but it just ended up being people just cooking my meals. I still don’t think to this day I’ve had anyone submit their own one-pound meal idea.”
With no formal training, the Surrey-born chef, 35, says he picked up his culinary skills from having a “front-row seat” in professional kitchens during his teens and 20s.
“I worked in golf clubs, hotels, McDonald’s, Pizza Express… Basically, I worked in them all, lots and lots of kitchens. I was normally just the washer-upper. Even at McDonald’s, I was the washer-upper when I first got there. I always found it really fascinating, because back then there weren’t really that many cookery shows on the telly. So I learned in the restaurants by myself.”
When his first book landed, Barclay had around 30k Instagram followers. Now, after quitting the day job to work full-time in food, that figure has risen to 290k, and says he knows instinctively what his “very strong core of followers” want from his books.
The latest in the series, Green One Pound Meals, is focused on plant-based dishes – but it isn’t entirely meat-free. Instead, you’ll find recipes like chicken drumstick cassoulet and prawns and peas in tarragon sauce, alongside aubergine parm burger and green veg toad in the hole.
“Personally, I’m eating less and less meat,” says Barclay. “And that’s quite a big thing in the green space, not eating so much meat. It just felt right.”
lGreen One Pound Meals by Miguel Barclay is published by Headline Home, priced £16.99. Photography by Dan Jones. Available now.