We’ve got together with our friends at The Gourmet World, in Dorset, to run a really interesting competition with a great prize. The competition is to find the best ‘forgotten’ bread recipe in the country. Gourmet World are specialists in a wide range of artisan foods and have recently started running bread-making courses under the expert guidance of their master-baker, Boyd. They are particularly keen to ensure that knowledge of old recipes is not lost.

If you have an old, forgotten (possibly pre-war) recipe for bread then send it to us. Every recipe will be baked by Boyd and the best ten will be chosen. The finished products for those ten will then be taken to the Christchurch Food Festival where they will be subject to tasting by a panel of judges including Gourmet World’s ‘Club Gourmet’ team, BigBarn staff and a host of celebrity chefs. Finally, a winner will be announced at 12.30pm on 11th May.

The winner will receive a 3-day hands-on bread-making course at Gourmet World with B&B accommodation provided.

Send your recipes to ed@bigbarn.co.uk before Friday 13th April.

Watford football fans have set themselves the challenge of smuggling a pre-determined vegetable or fruit into every away game this season and having their picture taken with the offending item. The challenge, called ‘Five-a-day-away days’ has been a great success so far – they’ve taken chillis to Charlton, peppers to Portsmouth and mouldy potatoes to Old Trafford.

This week, the challenge is to get Carrots into West Ham, and with the carrot being so dear to BigBarn’s heart, and Carrot Man having smuggled his enormous carrot hat onto a flight from Turin, we thought it was high time to add our support to these magnificent heroes and their brave crusade. We ought to make them all BigBarn Fine Food Crusaders.

To follow their progress, have a look at http://bhappy.wordpress.com/tag/five-a-day-awaydays/