Book Review - One Pound Meals Fast & Fresh

I borrowed this book from the library and picked three recipes to try from it. First up was the Goan Cauliflower Curry.

The recipe makes a really creamy curry sauce that coats the cauliflower thoroughly. We really enjoyed this meal. It was a simple recipe to follow but made a lovely meal.

Next we tried the Spanish Chorizo Stew. Another simple one pot recipe that was easy to make but tasted delicious.

We had ours with some homemade bread and it was great. The last recipe we tried was the Hasselback Squash.

I totally misunderstood the recipe so I messed ours up a bit but it still tasted lovely. It was a real revelation to us that you can just roast a squash like this and eat it skin and all. The parma ham and feta cheese went beautifully with the squash. We'll definitely be having this one again.

The best thing about Miguel Barclay's recipes is that in the book they're all set up for 1 person making the book really accessible to everyone. Then you can just multiply based on how many people you're serving. I haven't seen a recipe book do this before.

A thing that usually bothers me about these cheap recipe books is that each recipe is costed only on what the recipe uses. Meaning if you buy a cauliflower but only use half of it then you're left with half a cauliflower to use up somehow or you have to have the same recipe again quick before your cauliflower goes bad. Not so with One Pound Meals, looking through the book you see a lot of ingredients commonly used. If you buy some chorizo and use some for one recipe there are easily 3-4 more recipes that use chorizo too. It makes it much easier to see someone struggling to afford ingredients get good value from their shopping.

A not good thing about this book (and many other recipe books) is that some of the meals are simply not enough food. We had the cauliflower curry and squash as sides and added some bread to go with the stew.

But overall this is a well thought out book that could actually save you money on your food shopping if you can carefully plan out a weeks meals using these recipes. Well done, Miguel!