The Big Feastival – and some foodie comps!

by Di · Published 03/07/2011 · Updated 11/06/2019

A couple of weeks ago I read about Jamie Oliver’s Big Feastival – and knew this would be the perfect opportunity to take 18 month old Ryland to his first festival! No overnight camping trauma, nice music, lots of family fun but mainly because of the pop-up kitchens and delicious food from some of London’s top restaurants. After all, our family certainly love to eat…

As soon as I read about it, I popped over to the Big Feastival Facebook page where there were lots of links to ticket competitions – I discovered that LoSalt were sponsoring the ‘Big Kitchen’ at the event and were running fun comps to win tickets on their Facebook page. My first entry, a photo of how I used LoSalt (sprinkled on my soya beans!), wasn’t a winner but for the next challenge you had to feature a tub of LoSalt in a photo so I convinced Rob to take his LoSalt and pretend to catch shrimp for the barbie at Rest Bay in Porthcawl…

We won a pair of VIP tickets for the Sunday but had to be back in Nottingham, so they generously arranged for us to have Saturday tickets instead.

With Mum-in-Law in tow, we arrived at Clapham Common when the doors opened at noon and had a wonderful time – Rob and I could pop in and out of the VIP area for our free drinks, and we had ten free food tokens to share between us. We tried a selection of goodies – Wahaca Tacos, Cafe Spice Lamb Koftas, Locanda Locitelli Kid Goat tagliatelle, Benares Chicken Tikka pies… My personal favourite was the Abeno Okono-miyaki, which reminded me of a fabulous meal I once had with JoJoEbi in Japan. Ryland’s favourite was the Trinity Scotch Eggs, I think he scoffed three of them in total…

As for the entertainment, there were loads of fun tents – Ry was a bit too young for the Lil Dudes’ Den, where there was storytelling and lots of crafts and painting, but he loved the retro funfair, where we made pathetic attempts to flip some decapitated rubber frogs into lilypads and took Ry on the carousel.

There was some splendid cake and crochet action in the WI tent, and Marawa’s hula-hooping was truly fabulous.

Lots of the chefs were doing demonstrations in the Big Kitchen tent; we caught a glimpse of Atul Kocher giving advice on buying spices (only buy them in small amounts and keep them in stainless steel containers) and of course there was a huge crowd there to watch Jamie at work!

In the neighbouring tent I was delighted to see that LoSalt were actually running a comp to guess how many tubs made up this robot chap on their stand. Richard told me I wasn’t allowed to win – but I was too busy laughing at his bright blue trousers to take any notice, so entered my guess of 397 anyway!

I didn’t know the bands playing on the main stage but Trophy Wife and the Special Ks provided a nice enough festival soundtrack – we left early at 5.30 but I’m sure if we’d stayed the Charlatans would have been great. We’d been to see the Flaming Lips at Alexandra Palace on Friday though, and I needed an early night – ah, the rock’n’roll lifestyle of a 37 year old mum!

Overall, The Big Feastival was an excellent family-friendly festival with loads to keep even the tiniest kids happy (giant teacups were popular with the tots!) – all the proceeds go to charity, so it’s a great fundraiser too (as we were lucky enough to get in for free we ensured we spent lots of money on the fairground stalls – we even won a cookery book). I hope Jamie does another one next year!

Foodie competitions
Now, I can’t possibly write a blog post without bringing you some tasty competitions to get your teeth into, so here are a few I found out about this weekend…

Win a Summer hamper by submitting your best Cheshire Cheese recipe to info@thirtypr.com before 10 July 2011 – tickle the judge’s tastebuds, and you might end up a winner! You can find out more at the Joseph Heler Facebook page.

Check out the Win Prizes tab on the Schwartz Cooking Club Facebook page for their weekly giveaways – this week, leave a picnic tip and you could win a hamper.

Eat Japan are running a competition to win Japanese foodie prizes – cook one of their 6 recipes and upload a photo of it to win. This closes on 31 October 2011 – the recipes sound yummy so I’ll definitely be entering!

On the Japanese theme, Kikkoman have a trip to Amsterdam up for grabs – you need to do something creative with Kikkoman soy sauce (it doesn’t have to be a recipe!) and (unfortunately) the winner will be the entry with the most votes. Entries close on 10 July 2011.

And finally, there are three prizes of the entire Bart Spices Thai range on offer in their easy to enter prize draw at www.bartspices.com/static/competition/ – enter before 24 July 2011.

Richard says:
05/07/2011 at 12:16 pm
Hi Di
Great to meet you and the family.
Glad you had a good day. Was a really great event and so much fun to be be part of!
Also, glad you found my blue trousers so amusing! I had to just wear shorts on Sunday though, was just too hot!!
Richard