The cost of living crisis is making the prospect of the weekly food shop and cooking rather scary, especially as we've seen supermarket prices skyrocket, with the cost of Lurpak reaching up to £7 in some stores.
With everyone counting the pennies at the moment, chef Miguel Barclay has shared some of his top tips with The Mirror, including where to find the best bargains in the supermarket and how to avoid making a costly mistake when cooking in the oven.
Miguel has recently partnered with WW to show people that they can make healthy meals on a budget and he was even seen teaching Lorraine Kelly how to cook.
Ahead of the release of his seventh cookbook, Green One Pound Meals, he said: "You've got to plan ahead. If you're going to waste food then you need to almost cost it in, so if you buy something and throw half of it away then you have to pretend that you bought it for double the price.
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"The only way to eliminate waste is to plan ahead so what you want to be doing is overlapping ingredients. So you write down the days of the week on an A4 piece of paper, you put your first meal, that's the non-negotiable meal, which is probably for most people something like a Sunday roast. And then you work it out from there.
"So you know you're gonna have chicken leftover on the Mondays. So maybe you put a chicken pie in or chicken pasty or maybe something like a risotto with chicken. So and then you know what you're left with after that. So if you're going to do a chicken pie, then you're going to be left with excess pastry. So what are you going to do with that pastry? Then you fill that in on another day.
"Often people get distracted. So once you've got your plan, you've got to stick to it. Because if you get distracted in the shop, and you buy something that you weren't intending to buy - like there's a special offer on a joint of beef or something when you get there - then it throws everything else sort of into disarray.
"You can spend an hour planning your week and if you swap an ingredient there and then when you're in the supermarket, you've literally got like 30 seconds to recalculate the entire week and understand what's leftover and what the knock-on effect of it is going to be.
"So you've really got to just stick to your plan, spend an hour doing it, and then stick to it. And that's the best way to eliminate waste."
Miguel also shared where to find the best bargains in the supermarkets - and traps to avoid when trying to get the best price.
He recommends just buying "normal ordinary ingredients" instead of more exotic ones as supermarkets will be competing to have the cheapest prices on everyday items, like cheddar cheese or vegetables.
Whereas if you were to buy fancier cheese than cheddar, there's not as much competition so you'd be paying 'premium' for other options.
He continued: "Another tip would be shopping on the world food aisle. Okay, so if you're going to buy spices, you can go to the spice aisle and you can buy a lovely little glass jar with cumin in it. Or you can go to the world aisle and you can get like a massive bag with cumin. Like almost the same price. So it's not packaged as fancy but it's a lot better but value for money.
"Same goes for stuff like rice. If you go to the rice aisle like you're just gonna get these little small bags of rice or the microwave patches of rice. Go to the world food or you've got the biggest bag of rice you've ever seen 10 kilogrammes for 12 quid. And that's a great way to help sort of reduce costs. And then also you don't need to concentrate 100% on the price of the ingredients."
The chef says dried items like rice, pasta and noodles are always great to have in the cupboard, as they don't go off and you can make so many meals from them with leftovers, such as stir-fries, fried rice and risotto.
Another way to cut costs when cooking is not to just put one thing in the oven at a time - which is a mistake many of us make.
Miguel recommends cooking multiple meals at once to save money and energy.
"If you're going to turn the oven on or just cook one thing, cook two or three things at the same time," he said. "Like if you're gonna have a quiche tomorrow and you're cooking a pie today, then why not cook the quiche and the pie at the same time and you don't have to turn the oven on again.
"And then you could maybe do three items. So imagine you're doing a Cornish pasty for your lunchbox tomorrow, and the quiche and the pie, put them all in there at the same time. The Cornish Pasty you're going to eat cold anyway, the Quiche you're going to eat cold, so do it that way."
If you don't want to use the oven, using a slow cooker is a good way to reduce energy bills as well, claims Miguel.
These can be used to make a curry, simmering on a lower price instead of being cooked over a huge gas flame.
Do you have a top money-saving tip to share? We want to hear all about it. Email us at yourmirror@mirror.co.uk
