Happy Friday, friends.

This week we welcomed our first guests to the new farm dinner space, Black Cat Farmstead. The last guests dined on the farm in early 2021. We waited nearly four years for this week.

The evenings began under the pergola, with guests savoring delicacies like wood-fired shrimp wrapped in prosciutto, baby potatoes stuffed with smoked trout, long-roasted tomato slices in puff pastry and flame-charred heirloom peppers laquered in dukkah seasoning. Guests sipped sparkling wine and watched the sky over the fields and mountains turn purple and pink, orange and salmon.

As the heavens turned kaleidoscopic, we escorted them to their private, glass-walled cabanas, each of which holds an antique wood-fired stove and vintage oil lamps. The cabanas, which now sport brick floors, fans and light sconces, are majestic dining rooms, offering enchanting views of pastoral, alpine and celestial splendor. Each party at Black Cat Farmstead dinners claims their cabana for the entire evening.

Farmstead team members—that includes Eric—brought a parade of courses to the cabanas. Sourdough bread made from organic flour we milled from our own wheat crop, with gorgeous slicks of flower-spangled butter. Wooden salad bowls layered with just-harvested greens. Appetizers and entrees featuring Black Cat Organic Farm lamb and pork; myriad vegetables from the farm; Patagonian bay scallops; salmon, broths made from pork and seaweed; desserts designed every night to complement the savory dishes; end-of-night tea brewed from lemon balm, mint and other herbs we grow on our organic farm. 

During the course of the week, the menu changed every night. We aim to continue this daily evolution of the menu. As we grow more than 250 varieties of vegetables, herbs, grains, legumes and flowers on the farm, with fruit on tap for next year, we don’t suffer from a shortage of ingredients—or inspiration. As different crops ripen throughout the year, we also use a variety of preservation methods to carry us through the winter and spring. These transformed vegetables can be just as thrilling on menus in February as fresh tomatoes in September.Probably 95 percent of the ingredients on guests’ plates come from our 500-acre organic farm. However, we also source ingredients like seafood from esteemed purveyors, as well as ingredients like lemons, olive oil, chocolate and more. Could we grow and raise everything, we would. Either way, when you dine at Black Cat Farmstead, know that nearly everything you savor comes from our farm.

Read on for a little bit more about Farmstead dinners, including how to make reservations. We cannot wait to take care of you at Black Cat Farmstead. 

We also look forward to seeing you this weekend at our Boulder County Farmers Market booths in Boulder and Longmont; our Farm Store; and at Bramble & Hare—more than 15 years of true farm to table in downtown Boulder. 

Farmers Market

nless things pivot dramatically, this will be the last farmers market of 2024 before the season’s first hard frost. It could take place Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Once the frost strikes, all of the fruiting vegetables in the fields, like peppers, tomatoes, squash and more, turn to mush. Those fields then become vast buffets for our heritage pigs. 

Prior to that first frost, we’ll harvest as much as we can, and have it for sale at next weekend’s farmers market. Vegetables like winter squash dwell in cold storage for months, and you’ll continue finding them for sale at our outlets well into 2025. But tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant and many other veggies? They fail to enjoy long shelf lives. So if you plan to stock up on those vegetables for the sake of preservation—tomato sauce, roasted peppers, etc.—this weekend is a perfect time to get that done.

We have referenced roasting peppers in previous posts, and here’s another way to go about it. Just toss them on the grill. As you can see in the photo, the skins can get awfully blackened, and that’s OK. After you bag them (keep the skins on) and slide them in the freezer, those charred skins should peel off once they’re thawed. And then you can use them in a variety of dishes. 

This Saturday at our Boulder County Farmers Market booths in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.), look for:

• Bok choi
• Senposai
• Tatsoi
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Arugula
• Head lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Mizuna
• Beets
• Turnips (limited)
• Radishes (limited)
• Cilantro
• Eggplant
• Peppers 
• Tomatoes 
• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes (limited)
• Pork sausage
• Pork
• Roving wool from our sheep

Farm Store

This weekend at the Farm Store, you’ll find bulk pricing for eggplant, peppers, and tomatoes. So if you indeed anticipate preserving these vegetables, this stands as an excellent opportunity.

One fun preseravtion method for peppers is making sauce. We don’t grow many spicy hot peppers, so you probably can’t craft your own take on a sauce like Tabasco or Cholula. But our peppers come packed with flavor, and many of them now are red, meaning they have picked up sweet notes. Blended with garlic and salt, fermented for a spell (for flavor, rather than probiotics) and then cooked with vinegar and stored in a glass jar, the sauce will keep for quite a while in the refrigerator. It can work wonders as a sandwich spread, in salads and pastas, with potatoes and much more.

Here’s a simple way to turn a bunch of Black Cat Organic Farm peppers into a favor-packed sauce.

Take about two pounds of peppers; we think red, yellow and orange ones make the most flavorful sauce. Remove their stems, slice in half lengthwise and scrape out seeds. No need to rid them of every last seed; a quick scrape with a knife is fine. Give them a few chops. 

Smash some garlic cloves, and remove the skins. If you’re a garlic fanatic, you could easily run with 10 cloves. If you don’t want it too garlicky, go with three or four.

Put the peppers and garlic in a food processor. If the peppers already are fairly sweet you could skip adding a sweetener like sugar or honey, but it might taste more balanced with at least a tablespoon of sweetener. After it’s blended, you can taste and then decide to add more sweetener if you want. Add a tablespoon of kosher salt to the blender. Pulse until it forms a coarse puree. 

Place the puree in a glass jar of some sort, or a bowl, put a cheesecloth or dish towel over it, and let is sit for about a week. Give it a stir every day.

After a week, pour the puree into a saucepan, add 1/2-1 cup of white distilled vinegar to the pan and heat over medium. Bring to a boil, and then simmer for five minutes or so. Let it cool.

At this point, it’s ready. If it were a hot sauce, we’d recommend straining out the solids and pouring the liquid into the kinds of jars used for hot sauce. But this sauce is more about flavor than heat. We like just keeping the puree in the fridge and adding it by the dollop to dishes that we think might sing with the addition of sweet, fermented peppers.

This week at the Farm Store, open Friday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 4975 Jay Road, look for:

• Bok choi
• Senposai
• Tatsoi
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Arugula
• Head lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Mizuna
• Beets
• Turnips (limited)
• Radishes (limited)
• Cilantro
• Eggplant (bulk pricing available)
• Peppers (bulk pricing available)
• Tomatoes (bulk pricing available)
• Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Sheep pelts

Meats

• Beef
• Pork cuts
• Pork sausages (chorizo, and breakfast sausage)
• Dog food from Black Cat Organic Farm

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Eggs
• Mushrooms
• Onion jam
• Pork lard with garlic and herbs
• Ratatouille
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Tomato puree

Local Provisions

• Full Stop sourdough crackers, in various (outstanding) flavors
• Bibamba pate au chocolate
• Bee Grateful honey caramels
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Green Tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and miso
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Chiporro hot sauces

Black Cat Farmstead

Black Cat Farmstead dinners represent a pinnacle of culinary craft, pastoral atmospherics and unparalleled dining experiences. We’ve worked toward these dinners for close to four years. The prix fixe dinners will cost $150 per person, not including gratuity, beverages and taxes. 

For those of you who visited our farm dinner program during 2020 and early 2021, when the evening meals captivated the community during such a traumatic period, you will recognize much. But everything now is vastly improved. Welcome to Farm Dinners 2.0.

The glass-walled, private cabanas have been moved around on the property, and now have proper roofs as well as insulation. They’re as sturdy as anvils—fitting, as the property where you’ll dine served as the blacksmithing center for the many Scandinavian dairy farmers who settled the area in the 19th century. Each cabana enjoys its own real wood-burning stove. We think they’re kind of magic.

The property now has lovely bathrooms, too, in historic buildings near the cabanas. The old barn that served as a staging ground for food back during those miserable Covid years now contains a splendid commercial kitchen. Out back, just off the kitchen, now sits a wood-fired grill with a large rotisserie. You’d better believe we’ll be using that for dishes.

The setting—on the top of a hill overlooking some of our fields of vegetable cultivation, with stunning Continental Divide views—remains as dramatic. 

If you desire dining with us during the week of Nov. 12—the first week of regular reservations—visit the Black Cat website (blackcatboulder.com) on the morning of Monday, Nov. 4, and select the night you’d like to join us. For this first week, we will host guests on the 14th, 15th and 16th. In future weeks, we’ll add Wednesday as a night of dining. Once the week’s reservations sell out, we won’t open reservations again until the following Monday. 

We look forward to serving you this autumn—and for many years to come—at our family farmstead. 

Thank you all for your support!

Bramble & Hare

When you dine at the nation’s most true farm-to-table restaurant, most of the ingredients in the delicious dishes come from our organic farm. It’s located just a handful of miles from Bramble & Hare. We raise much of the livestock that supplies our meat. Nearly all of the vegetables thrive on our Boulder County farm. Could we grow lemons and olives, you know we would.

Shishito peppers, of which we grew several bazillion this year, star in an appetizer that combines the roasted peppers with sesame aioli and ginger gastrique. It’s a marvel, and immensely popular with guests. Guests are also trumpeting our stuffed green pepper with braised pork and lamb, grana padang and pickled jalapeño.

A new entree, winter squash risotto with honey nut squash puree and pepita frico, has also earned quite a bit of adoration. Another recent addition to the always rotating menu: Heritage pork with sweet potatoes, pepper goat cheese puree and apple chutney. We grow our own sweet potatoes—you don’t routinely encounter organic Colorado sweet potatoes. They’re divine. 

As fall continues its agonizingly slow approach, a few of our desserts might speak to your fall vibes. Pumpkin crème spiced caramel with cranberry jam and sourdough gingerbread cookies (!), and carrot cake with cinnamon apples and caramel (!). Sink into the season with the most seasonal restaurant in Colorado—a true culinary reflection of Boulder County.

Happy Friday, friends.

We hope you are enjoying the return of autumn. The farm team appreciated the chill and clouds, and boy were they busy. Due to the lack of a hard frost—we normally have one by now—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and much more continue thriving in the fields.

This amounts to excellent news for you—the bounty at our Farmers Market booths and the Farm Store is impressive. The flood of organic vegetables also makes its way into the Bramble & Hare kitchen, and onto guests’ plates. And they’ll also receive the star treatment at our farm dinners, which begin next week for parties of eight or more. Read on for much more about the long-awaited return of farm dinners.

Enjoy the weekend!

Farm Dinners Return!

As we detailed in an email last week, our farm dinners are FINALLY returning! In case you missed last week’s newsletter, we are including much of the same language here. However, we do have some updates.

On October 21, 22, 23 and 27, reservations are available for parties of eight or more. To make reservations, please send an email to events@blackcatboulder.com. These will be our first farm dinners since early 2021, and also the first ones in their permanent home. 

Our Farm Dinners represent a pinnacle of culinary craft, pastoral atmospherics and unparalleled dining experiences. We’ve worked toward these dinners for close to four years. The prix fixe dinners will cost $150 per person, not including gratuity, beverages and taxes. 

For those of you who visited our farm dinner program during 2020 and early 2021, when the evening meals captivated the community during such a traumatic period, you will recognize much. But everything now is vastly improved. Welcome to Farm Dinners 2.0.

The glass-walled, private cabanas have been moved around on the property, and now have proper roofs as well as insulation. They’re as sturdy as anvils—fitting, as the property where you’ll dine served as the blacksmithing center for the many Scandinavian dairy farmers who settled the area in the 19th century. Each cabana enjoys its own real wood-burning stove. We think they’re kind of magic.

The property now has lovely bathrooms, too, in historic buildings near the cabanas. The old barn that served as a staging ground for food back during those miserable Covid years now contains a splendid commercial kitchen. Out back, just off the kitchen, now sits a wood-fired grill with a large rotisserie. You’d better believe we’ll be using that for dishes.

The setting—on the top of a hill overlooking some of our fields of vegetable cultivation, with stunning Continental Divide views—remains as dramatic. 

Today, we are busy gearing up for our reopening with staff hiring and training as well as organizing the restaurant’s kitchen and dining spaces. Eric is busy, of course, in the new kitchen testing recipes and planning menus. 

We anticipate opening reservations to the public on the week of November 12th, about a month from now. In the meantime, as mentioned earlier, we are opening in October for private parties and groups of 8 or more.

When we soon start taking reservations—you will literally be the first to know—our plan is to bring back the protocol we followed during Farm Dinners 1.0. We’ll open reservations every Monday morning for the following week. Once the week’s reservations sell out, we won’t open reservations again until the following Monday. For reservations beginning in mid-November, we will offer an OpenTable link. 

We look forward to serving you this autumn—and for many years to come—at our family homestead. 

Thank you all for your support!

Farmers Market

We’re still swimming in tomatoes. Normally by this date—October 18—the season’s first frost has struck. Tomatoes on the vine turn to mush. Pigs enter the fields and commence chomping. They revel in what must be pig ecstasy. A porcine bacchanalia. 

But frost has yet to land. As a result tomatoes persist on the vines. Some now are past their prime, but plenty more are stunningly sweet and delicious.

We’ve already offered a recipe for roasting smaller tomatoes, like cherries. Here’s an approach that works well for both plum tomatoes, which offer quite a bit of meat, and fatter heirloom varieties.

With these tomatoes, we make sauce.

One classic preparation comes from exquisite cookbook author Marcella Hazan, widely considered the doyenne of Italian cuisine. She’s was a treasure.

In her 1973 book The Classic Italian Cook Book, Hazan published a simple recipe for tomato sauce that now is one of the most visited recipes on the New York Times wildly popular Cooking app. It gets referenced worldwide as a perfect recipe.

We’re offering the recipe below. Do feel free to experiment with it, if you’re inclined. For instance if you don’t eat dairy, replace the butter with good olive oil. It achieves the fat part of the equation, and adds a different flavor to the final product. Also, if you find the tomato sauce a touch too oniony, just add half of an onion, rather than a whole, to the sauce.

Tomato and Onion Sauce

Begin with about 2 pounds of Black Cat Organic Farm tomatoes—any combination of heirlooms and plums will work, as will all plums or all heirlooms. Using a method we outlined in an earlier newsletter, rub tomatoes against the big holes on a box grater that is resting within a bowl. Toss the skins, which will end up in your hand as you grate. Once you’ve got about 4 1/2 cups of tomato juice in the bowl, add it to a medium saucepan. Then add a yellow onion that you have peeled and cut in half to the saucepan. Stir in 5 tablespoons of butter (or olive oil) to the tomatoes and onion, and then add a teaspoon of salt.

Cook it over medium-low, uncovered. Stir it once in a while. After about an hour or so, the sauce will be done. Season with additional salt if it needs it.

If you’d like to make much more in one batch—recommended!—follow the same ratios in the recipe and make loads. Once it’s cool, use at least some of it straight away for pasta. For the rest, you can pour it into mason jars or Ziplock bags and store in the freezer. It’ll keep until next summer.

Buon appetito!

This Saturday at our Boulder County Farmers Market booths in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.), look for:

• Winter squash—a diversity of varieties
• Salad mix
• Arugula
• Kale
• Mizuna
• Bok choi
• Tat soi
• Head lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Eggplant
• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Cilantro
• Sweet potatoes (limited)
• Potatoes
• Beets
• Magenta turnips
• Hakurei turnips
• Pork sausage
• Pork
• Roving wool from our sheep

Farm Store

We look forward to serving you at the Farm Store all weekend! We’ll have tomatoes to make the delicious sauce offered above. In addition, we’ll have quite a lot of winter squash—among much more—and we urge you to consider a squash soup. Curried butternut is a favorite. So are squash soups that tap the beauty of sage.
This week at the Farm Store, open Friday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 4975 Jay Road, look for:

• Winter squash—a diversity of varieties
• Cabbage (limited)
• Cauliflower (limited)
• Salad mix
• Arugula
• Kale
• Mizuna
• Bok choi
• Tatsoi
• Senposai (limited)
• Head lettuce
• Mustard greens
• Eggplant
• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Cilantro
• Sweet potatoes (limited)
• Potatoes
• Beets
• Hakurei turnips
• Magenta turnips
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Sheep pelts

Meats

• Beef
• Pork cuts
• Pork sausages (chorizo, and breakfast sausage)
• Dog food from Black Cat Organic Farm

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Eggs
• Mushrooms
• Onion jam
• Pork lard with garlic and herbs
• Ratatouille
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Tomato puree

Local Provisions

• FFull Stop sourdough crackers, in various (outstanding) flavors
• Bibamba pate au chocolate
• Bee Grateful honey caramels
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Green Tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and miso
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Chiporro hot sauces

Bramble & Hare

When you dine at the nation’s most true farm-to-table restaurant, most of the ingredients in the delicious dishes come from our organic farm. It’s located just a handful of miles from Bramble & Hare. We raise much of the livestock that supplies our meat. Nearly all of the vegetables thrive on our Boulder County farm. Could we grow lemons and olives, you know we would.

Shishito peppers, of which we grew several bazillion this year, star in an appetizer that combines the roasted peppers with sesame aioli and ginger gastrique. It’s a marvel, and immensely popular with guests. Guests are also trumpeting our stuffed green pepper with braised pork and lamb, grana padang and pickled jalapeño.

A new entree, winter squash risotto with honey nut squash puree and pepita frico, has also earned quite a bit of adoration. Another recent addition to the always rotating menu: Heritage pork with sweet potatoes, pepper goat cheese puree and apple chutney. We grow our own sweet potatoes—you don’t routinely encounter organic Colorado sweet potatoes. They’re divine. 

As fall continues its agonizingly slow approach, a few of our desserts might speak to your fall vibes. Pumpkin crème spiced caramel with cranberry jam and sourdough gingerbread cookies (!), and carrot cake with cinnamon apples and caramel (!). Sink into the season with the most seasonal restaurant in Colorado—a true culinary reflection of Boulder County.

Happy Monday, friends.

We have big news to share. After three years of grueling physical and permitting work, Black Cat Farm Dinners are about to finally open again for business—for good!

For those of you who visited our farm dinner program during 2020 and early 2021, when the evening meals captivated the community during such a traumatic period, you will recognize much. But everything now is vastly improved. Welcome to Farm Dinners 2.0.

The glass-walled, private cabanas have been moved around on the property, and now have proper roofs as well as insulation. They’re as sturdy as anvils—fitting, as the property where you’ll dine served as the blacksmithing center for the many Scandinavian dairy farmers who settled the area in the 19th century. Each cabana enjoys its own real wood-burning stove. We think they’re kind of magic.

The property now has lovely bathrooms, too, in historic buildings near the cabanas. The old barn that served as a staging ground for food back during those miserable Covid years now contains a splendid commercial kitchen. Out back, just off the kitchen, now sits a wood-fired grill with a large rotisserie. You’d better believe we’ll be using that for dishes.

The setting—on the top of a hill overlooking some of our fields of vegetable cultivation, with stunning Continental Divide views—remains as dramatic. 

Today, we are busy gearing up for our reopening with staff hiring and training as well as organizing the restaurant’s kitchen and dining spaces. Eric is busy, of course, in the new kitchen testing recipes and planning menus. 

We anticipate opening reservations to the public on the week of November 12th, about a month from now. In the meantime, we are opening in October for private parties and groups of 8 or more. Please email us at events@blackcatboulder.com if you’d like to book a group table in October. 

When we soon start taking reservations—you will literally be the first to know—our plan is to bring back the protocol we followed during Farm Dinners 1.0. We’ll open reservations every Monday morning for the following week’s reservations. Once the week’s reservations sell out, we won’t open reservations again until the following Monday.

Stay tuned! The next time you hear about Farm Dinners, we’ll have much more information, including the cost (it will be prix fixe), details about the adult beverage program, hours of operation and of course a key tidbit: Where you can go to make reservations.

We look forward to serving you this autumn—and for many years to come—at our family homestead. 

Thank you all for your support!

The acknowledgement by Michelin of all that we have done to build a restaurant and farm that complement each other is a distinction that we hold close to our hearts. 

We have devoted more than 17 years of our lives to figuring out how to operate restaurants with deep roots in community, beginning with soil. Shortly after opening our first restaurant, Black Cat Bistro, we began growing vegetables like carrots and peas on a small scale—as in, our back yard. That was in 2006. Fast-forward to 2023, and we now steward land that supports more than 425 acres of vegetables, grains, legumes, herbs and flowers, and raise heritage pigs and sheep. 

From the beginning, we understood the farm would be certified USDA Organic. We rejected saturating soil and plants with harmful chemicals, just to deal with pests and weeds. Not only does the practice introduce harmful chemicals to the people in our community, it also kills soil—which should be a living thing!—and corrupts our beloved Boulder community’s environment. 

Along the way, we also embraced a variety of biodynamic farming methods, such as the incorporation of livestock into the farm. And we pursued key aspects of regenerative farming, which especially champions soil health. Among other things, our expansive grain program—we grow myriad heritage grains, and mill them into flours for use in our restaurants—fits squarely into some of the hallmarks of regenerative farming.

Restaurant waste? Our approach has dramatically curtailed it—and it’s a problem in the restaurant industry. Instead of trucks pulling up in the alley behind Bramble & Hare every hour across every day, trucks filled with lamb from New Zealand, chile peppers from Mexico, cabbage from China and tomatoes from California, we source most of our food from our farm down the street. Artichokes, carrots, Asian greens, parsley, lamb, pork, eggplant, wheat, fava beans and hundreds of other ingredients—we grow it all in vibrant, living, Boulder County soil.

Farm-to-table in February in Boulder County’s punishing steppe-like climate? We preserve an enormous variety of the things that we raise, which allows us to pamper guests with local food 12 months out of the year. Tomatoes get transformed into sauces and many pounds of sun-dried fruit. The farm team raises corn specifically for polenta, which we serve year-round in the restaurant. Our culinary pros cure cuts like pork and lamb legs into charcuterie. Peppers get fermented and sun-dried. Beans get dried, including the acres of garbanzo beans we grow every year and turn into things like hummus. We even make our absinthe-like spirit, from seeds we harvest from fennel plants.

At Black Cat Organic Farm we save seeds to plant the following year, and rotate fields constantly to ensure soil vitality. We shepherd pigs into already-harvested fields to provide them delicious and healthy organic food, but also to turn over and fertilize fields, and rid plots of weeds. Pigs represent a much better weed-removal approach than toxic chemicals!

The whole team, from the kitchen and dining rooms to the fields, is grateful for the Michelin Guide’s recognition of all of the work, savvy and commitment that we have poured into building both Black Cat Organic Farm and Bramble & Hare.

We look forward to welcoming you to our dining room, to share with you the fruits of our fields and the culinary wizardry that takes place in Bramble & Hare every evening.

Happy Friday, friends.

Our acres devoted to tomatoes are so thick with fruit that we fear the land itself might sink. We raised enough of one of our star vegetables that we could probably craft a pool of sauce the perimeter and depth of the Boulder Reservoir. Yes—it’s been an epic growing season for the many varieties of tomatoes we grew this year.

Read on to learn much more about our upcoming Harvest Celebration “Dirt Dinner” showcasing tomatoes, as well as our altered plans for U-Pick this year. Get ready to start making sauce, beginning this Saturday!

Meanwhile, we will see you at our booths at Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont; at our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road; and at Bramble & Hare, the most true farm-to-table restaurant in the United States.

Enjoy the weekend!

September 11th Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Tomatoes

We are excited to confirm your reservation with us for our Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner of TOMATOES! And bonus for newsletter subscribers: As the Monday dinner is already close to sold out, we are opening up Tuesday for another Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner reveling in all things tomato—YOU are the first to know! 

Our “Dirt Dinner” series is an ever-changing weekly celebration of one vegetable harvested at its peak from our farm. This annual TOMATO celebration dinner is the culmination of months of hard work.  Beginning in March, we planted and nurtured an astounding 10,000 tomato plants, representing 18 distinctive tomato varieties.  As part of our celebration, we’ve crafted a tomato-centric menu to allow our chefs to explore the uniqueness tomatoes can offer in every course (including dessert and a craft cocktail). This is where our geeky-creative side gets to come out!

As these celebratory nights features ONLY our Harvest Dirt Dinner menu, it is important to let us know in advance of any DIETARY RESTRICTIONS in your party.

As we usher in the heart of the  tomato season for the Front Range in Colorado, this event also marks the beginning of our tomato canning season that will see us preserving thousands of pounds of tomatoes for the winter ahead. We hope this dinner inspires you to put up tomatoes at home too. Toward that end we offer bushels and pecks of tomatoes ready for canning at our Black Cat Farm Store on Jay Road, at 4975 Jay Road every weekend into October, beginning this Saturday. Read on for much more about this new program.

We look forward to seeing you.  

Warm Regards, Eric, Jill, and the Bramble Team

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, September 11 and Tuesday, September 12 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

Naturally, you will find our tomatoes in abundance at our Farmers Market stalls at both Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday). Ditto for peppers, eggplant, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, basil and a bazillion other goodies. 

Do look for our shishito peppers. We think when pan-fried in olive oil until blistered all over and showered with salt, shishitos are fabulous for any gathering: a barbecue, a dinner party, a pre-dinner snack on Tuesday night. And the above approach is awfully malleable. Having a stir fry for dinner? Then swap out the olive oil for roasted sesame oil, and splash with soy sauce rather than salt. Thai food? Fry in coconut oil and douse with fish sauce. Would a teaspoon of Thai curry paste added to the hot pan somehow improve the dish? It would. Leaning into Spain? Then go the olive oil and salt route, but add smoked paprika to the pan. Some minced garlic tossed to the skillet a minute or two before it’s ready to serve? Absolutely.
You’re welcome.

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Sweet Potatoes
• Basil 
• Summer beans 
• Cucumbers
• Eggplant
• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Fennel
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Roving wool from our sheep

Farm Store

This year the Farm Store serves as Central Command for all things Black Cat Organic Farm tomatoes. We had hoped to host our U-Pick this year, but the insurance company that insures most small farms nationwide has pulled out of insuring farms that hold events with guests, like U-Picks, pumpkin patches and the like. We searched for other insurance partners, but didn’t have enough time this go around. Our hope is that by next year this issue is resolved. It’s going to hit a lot of farmers—not just us.

Either way, it is important to us to offer to our community bulk vegetables, which people can use to can, freeze, dry or ferment for off-season veggie glory. When the U-Pick fell through, we decided to bring our tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and basil to the Farm Store, and offer them in bulk—with commensurate bulk pricing.

For our organic heirloom tomatoes, the normal price is $5/pound. Bulk pricing is different. For 10 pounds boxes, it’s $3.50/pound. For 20 pound boxes, $2.25/pound.

We will also offer discount bulk pricing for eggplant, peppers and basil at the Farm Store.

Visit us on Saturdays and Sundays for the foreseeable for mountains of organic vegetables to bring home and preserve by making sauces and freezing them, canning and other preservation techniques.

For CSA members, the guidelines attached to your CSA still apply. But instead of hand-picking them this year, you will be able to walk away with pre-harvested boxes of vegetables.

Another Black Cat Organic Farm treat in this newsletter? Absolutely. We raised thousands of huge sunflower plants this season, in two varieties: Mammoth Grey, and Salt and Roast. The technical term for these and similar varieties is “confectionery,” meaning they are not designed for yielding sunflower oil, nor are they purely decorative. No, these are the kinds that farmers grow for the seeds, which get roasted and scarfed down by hungry humans (and are especially beloved by birds, too). 

We will offer whole heads of sunflowers, each of them dense with sunflower seeds in their shells, at the Farm Store and Farmers Market booths for quite a while. 

Eric likes liberating the fat seeds from the head (you can do it with your hands by just rubbing across them, or get help with a spoon or some other dull tool), boiling them for three minutes, and then drying in the oven or out in the sun (if outdoors, just make sure the drying situation is not accessible to squirrels or birds). Shower with salt. Commence eating organic sunflower seeds.

In addition, Eric recommends hanging whole heads from a tree branch or some other arm-like deal in the yard, and make sure it’s visible from a window or three. Birds will flock to the gigantic blossom and spend hours climbing around it eating seeds. 

Enjoy! This is a wonderful pursuit for kids.

Farm Store

Please visit us at the Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road, open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. for:

• Sweet potatoes
• Basil
• Cucumbers
• Eggplant
• Summer beans
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Fennel 
• Onions
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread

Meats

• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Orange Fig spread
• Full Stop sourdough crackers
• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chips tortilla chips
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Green tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• BeeOch beard and body care products
• Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
• Vital You toner mists, soaps
• Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen

Bramble & Hare

These newbies to the Bramble menu wowed guests during the past week. If we don’t have them when you visit in coming weeks, that’s because we change the menu constantly to reflect the daily harvest. One guarantee: Whatever serve as their replacements on the menu will sing.

Beautiful squash blossoms continue to spangle our fields, and we have been harvesting them with abandon. Our blossoms stuffed with local goat cheese, pistachio tarator and pickled onions have been described as addictive many times. We’d love to share them with you.

And then there’s our ratatouille—this is a spectacular vegetarian entree, but one that only shines for the next few weeks, when all of the key ingredients are ripe and ready. Feeling expansive and downright oceanic? Then try the pan-seared salmon with our sweet potato hash, sautéed fennel, marinated tomatoes and beurre blanc. The merguez-stuffed quail has also been a huge hit—it’s bright with flavors from red onions, Anaheim peppers, salted cucumbers and raita. Don’t miss the Boulder County grass-fed beef dish, with saffron rice pilaf, Hazel Dell mushrooms, Detroit beets and braised celery. This entree will captivate you. And finally, dessert will punctuate your evening of pampering and deliciousness with a parade of exclamation marks—not just one! 

We look forward to taking care of you this week at Bramble & Hare!

Happy Friday, friends.

And happy Labor Day Weekend!

Prepare for the heat. It’s looking like a scorcher. Lakes and streams are calling. The High Country beckons. And the summer swelter invites us to bag the oven, skip the stove and head outside to fire up the grill. For that, we have lots to offer. Whole eggplant grilled until charred all over, and then used to make baba ganoush. Sliced squash slathered in olive oil, kissed with zatar and latticed with grill marks. Onions and peppers blackened and incorporated into salsa. And of course, burgers and rib-eye, sausage and long-cooked pork shoulder, lamb chops and chicken thighs and Alaskan salmon. 

Another option? Grilled sweet potato. We’ve been cultivating the tuber for years, and are just harvesting it now. Head to our Boulder County Farmers Market booths in Boulder and Longmont on Saturday, or to the Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road, to snag some glorious local and organic sweet potatoes.

You also could join us at Bramble & Hare on Monday, when we showcase this vegetable for our Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner.

One correction. Last week, we mistakenly referred to our summer beans as Phaseolus coccineus. This was incorrect. That genus/species is the scarlet runner bean (which we do grow!). The correct summer bean designation is Phaseolus vulgaris. Thank you, astute reader Stephanie, for drawing this to our attention!

Enjoy the holiday weekend!

September 4 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Sweet Potatoes

Since the bean mix-up revolved around Latin names, let’s head straight to the right identification for sweet potato: Ipomoea batatas. Perhaps the more interesting bit is the family to which sweet potatoes belong: Convolvulaceae. That bindweed to which you devote far too many hours removing from your garden? Same family. And just as the dreaded bindweed is a herbaceous perennial vine, so is its distant cousin the sweet potato. The regular ol’ potato, meanwhile, comes from a completely different family: Solanaceae.

We are familiar with the pies and fries made from sweet potato tubers, but the greens are lovely as well (and rarely seen for sale). 

Sweet potatoes enjoy an especially rich international history. They are native to either Central or South America, with evidence of domesticated sweet potatoes in Central America 5,000 years ago. Scholars believe they probably emerged somewhere between Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela.

In many countries, including Argentina, Puerto Rico and Brazil, the sweet potato is called batata. But in other countries, such as Mexico, Chile and all of Central America, they are called camote, which comes from the Nahuatl word for them: camotli. 

People in Polynesia have been growing sweet potatoes since long before Europeans began their age of exploration. Radiocarbon dating reveals its presence in the Cook Islands from between 1210 and 1400 CE. How did sweet potatoes get there? One theory posits that Polynesians had traveled to South America by boat, and brought back clippings of the plant, which over time spread to Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand. It wasn’t until Christopher Columbus’ 1492 expedition that Europeans tasted sweet potatoes. And in the 1600s, the Portugese brought sweet potatoes to Japan, where they are prized today, along with in Korea.

It took us several seasons of experimentation to finally grow sweet potatoes, which are highly sensitive to frost and also require a long growing season—never an ideal combination in the Front Range. The inspiration came from Jill’s dad, who grew up in an Italian family in Baltimore and remembered coming home from school to nosh on roasted baby sweet potatoes. Eric wondered if conditions at Black Cat Organic Farm could at least have enough runway to grow baby sweet potatoes, and so he gave it a whirl. Eventually, it worked. And Black Cat Organic Farm sweet potatoes often grow beyond the baby stage.

They are treasures! Sweet potatoes offer enviable textures, deep and rich flavor, and much in the way of culinary diversity. We are eager to welcome you to our dining room, send the tubers out on stage, and let them break out into multiple arias. One request: When you make reservations for Monday’s celebration, please let us know about any dietary preferences.

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, September 4 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

We look forward to seeing you.  

Warm Regards, Eric, Jill, and the Bramble Team

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Sweet Potatoes (NEW)
• Basil 
• Summer beans 
• Cucumbers
• Eggplant
• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Fennel
• Mint
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Sunflower bouquets 
• Leeks
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Carrots
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Cuts of lamb

Farm Store

Our cozy, happy little nook of Boulder, our Farm Store, is here for you Wednesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 4975 Jay Road. The Farm Store normally offers the same items for sale at the Farmers Market booth, plus much more. The Farm Store, which got started during miserable 2020 to offer Boulderites a safe place to pick up vegetables and provisions, continues to evolve. We love it, and anticipate continuing to build it into an important part of the region’s culinary foundations.

Please visit us at the Farm Store for:

• Sweet potatoes (NEW)
• Basil
• Cucumbers
• Eggplant
• Summer beans
• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Mint
• Fennel 
• Sunflower bouquets
• Onions
• Carrots
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Leeks
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread

Meats

• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chips tortilla chips
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Green tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• BeeOch beard and body care products
• Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
• Vital You toner mists, soaps
• Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen

The forecast suggests that the monsoon season is now arriving. So long, weeks of dry and hot. And hello eruptions of rain and cool. 

It’s a late start, but meteorologists predicted that, this being an El Niño year, the (mostly) annual pattern of late-afternoon thunderstorms would arrive somewhere in August, rather than July. We’ll take it. And we are quite pleased that the return of precipitation waited until we had harvested a lot of hay this week. If the fields had been sodden, we would have postponed driving the sickle bar mower into the fields, scything the hay and then turning it into big blocks of winter food for our sheep.

We’ve got a thrilling Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner on tap next week: summer beans. Read all about it below. In addition, we’ll be at the Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont, rain or shine, on Saturday morning and early afternoon. The Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. top 5 p.m., and as with our Market booths it’s loaded with organic veggies from our fields, as well as myriad other delights. And finally, Bramble & Hare is open Monday through Saturday for dinner service. The harvest bounty we are witnessing today gets sent to the culinary savants in the kitchen, who transform it all into sublime dishes for your pleasure. We hope to see you there.

Enjoy the cool weekend!

August 28 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Summer beans

Most of what we call summer beans find their foundation in the same species, Phaseolus coccineus. But just as the species for tomatoes, Solanum lycopersicum, yields a dizzying diversity of fruit shapes, colors, textures and flavors, so do summer beans come in a broad range of styles. These glorious vegetables take center stage on Monday’s Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner. One request: When you make reservations, please alert us to any dietery restrictions.

We plant fields of summer beans every year. The flavors can dazzle, and beans offer an excellent side benefit: They fix nitrogen in the soil. We always make sure to cultivate nitrogen fixers among our fields, and keep track of which ones held them, and when. Black Cat Organic Farm supports more than 250 varieties of vegetables, and hews to organic and regenerative agricultural practices. Leveraging nitrogen fixers in different fields every year ensures that, over the course of several seasons, all of our acreage receives assists from plants like beans that extract nitrogen from the air—thanks to bacteria on the plants’ roots—and converts it into food for plants. 

Summer beans are native to Central and South America. Evidence reveals indigenous peoples across Mexico and Peru have been cultivating them for thousands of years. Today, the species includes more than 130 cultivars:  Derby and Golden Wax, Rocquencourt and Triomphe de Farcy, Algarve and Trionfo Violetto. 

We plant numerous cultivars. Some are green, some yellow. Certain cultivars are speckled and purple, and others are mottled cranberry and white. All of them are delicious.

Bramble’s culinary team has been obsessing over preparations all week. We cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room and, over the course of the evening, bring you four courses inspired by summer beans, plus a welcome aperitif.

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, August 28 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

Finally—basil! We grow a few varieties of basil, and are thrilled that Black Cat Organic Farm will offer one of our favorite herbs at our Boulder County Farmers Market booths on Saturday in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.). 

Start hunting for basil-flecked pasta recipes, and getting ready to make lots of pesto. Some stir-fries, like the Taiwanese classic three cup chicken, call for fistfuls of basil—we’ve got you covered. We savor a BLT with a few basil leaves between the slices. A Caprese salad with out basil is not a Caprese salad, pizza is always improved by basil leaves, and the herb makes for an outstanding cocktail garnish, too. 

A tip: When making pesto (for which pine nuts are good but unnecessary—more affordable nuts like walnuts also yield pesto excellence), drop a few ice cubes into the blender or food processor. The frozen cubes shock the basil leaves in such a way that the pesto remains bright green, rather than mud colored, long after you’re done crafting the pesto.

In addition, we now will have cucumbers and eggplant at the Market! And we’ll be offering these gems until the first frost, normally in early October.

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Basil (New!)
• Summer beans (New!)
• Cucumbers (New!)
• Eggplant (New!)
• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Fennel
• Mint
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Sunflower bouquets 
• Leeks
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Carrots
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Cuts of lamb

Farm Store

If Saturday morning brings rain and gloom and you’d rather skip the farmers markets, don’t forget about the Farm Store, at 4975 Jay Road. The Store is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and offers everything we bring to the farmers markets—and much more. Here, you’ll find culinary provisions like ketchup, Basque piperade, salsas, French onion soup and much more, crafted by our culinary team. You’ll find provisions such as gluten-free bread, tempeh, honey and veggie burgers made by local artisans. 

And now, a smart new fence rings the Farm Store parking lot. Stay tuned for more and more improvements at the Farm Store across the year.

Among other things, we are heavy with peppers this year. Some are quite spicy. Most of our varieties, however, are mild. One simple preparation for peppers that lean into mild, but also contain a little bite (e.g., shishitos, espalettes, fushimis) is popping them into a hot skillet with olive oil or a neutral oil like sunflower, showering with salt, and moving them around in the pan until they are blistered. The next step? Eat. For a Japanese twist, use a little soy sauce instead of salt, add toasted sesame oil to the pan just before serving, speckle with roasted sesame seeds and serve. So good.

Please visit us at the Farm Store, located at 4975 Jay Road and open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for:

• Basil (New!)
• Cucumbers (New!)
• Eggplant (New!)
• Summer beans (New!)
• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Mint
• Fennel 
• Sunflower bouquets
• Onions
• Carrots
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Leeks
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread

Meats

• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chips tortilla chips
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Green tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• BeeOch beard and body care products
• Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
• Vital You toner mists, soaps
• Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen

Bramble & Hare

Farm tomato soup—the star ingredient comes from our farm. Farm gnocchi—Black Cat Organic Farm potatoes. Beet salad, our beets. Fried green tomatoes starring our organic fruit. Spring onion risotto with Detroit beets and braised fennel from the farm. The summer squash and cherry tomatoes in the pan-seared salmon dish, the red pepper, onions and turnips in the braised rabbit leg, and the polenta, celery and salsa components in the beef dish—all from our organic farm.

No other restaurant in the United States comes close to Bramble & Hare when it comes to alignment between farm and table. We’d love to take care of you in this Colorado treasure. As the harvest season continues to ramp up, the menus change with even more regularity and oomph. 

See you soon!

This week we finished harvesting wheat, drying it in the sun, and sending it to our own vintage mill, which turns the wheat berries into flour we use in Bramble & Hare dishes and sell at the Farm Store and Market booths. We also continued the chickpea harvest. We’ll dry the legumes and use them throughout the year. In addition, we are getting ready to plant more broccoli and cauliflower—the starts are in the shade beside the fields, poised for planting under Colorado’s blue skies and insistent sunlight. Long rows of outdoor tomatoes, which were mostly green just two weeks ago, today broadcast their readiness for topping burgers, getting simmered into sauce and commingling with other vegetables for gazpacho. And peppers are coming on strong, while eggplant is finally bulbous and teasing us with whispers about baba ganoush and ratatouille.

It takes a while for Colorado’s full vegetable cornucopia to announce its readiness for the season’s final act. But once the curtain opens, it’s quite a show. We savor it every year, and right now we sense the curtain’s steady rise.

We planted ourselves in this week’s long blast of arid heat to harvest the many vegetables that finally are ready for your counters and plates, as well as for our team of culinary magicians who work in Bramble & Hare’s kitchen. Come visit us! We’ll be at the Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. through Sunday. On Saturday, you’ll find us at Boulder County Farmers Market booths in Boulder and Longmont. And the restaurant part of the most true farm-to-table operation in the United States, Bramble & Hare, is open for dinner service every evening except for Sunday.

We look forward to spending time with you. Stay cool! The uncomfortable 90-something temperatures are supposed to stick around for a week or so. But then the forecast predicts the return of cooler afternoons.

August 21 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Garbanzo beans

Join us at Bramble & Hare on Monday, August 21 for an especially joyous Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner event. We’ll honor chickpeas all evening, one of the most versatile and important vegetables in the world. And don’t forget: Please do alert us to any dietary restrictionsupon booking reservations for Monday night’s event.

In Arabic, hummus is the word for chickpeas. The legumes are of vital importance across the Middle East, where cooked chickpeas are blitzed with tahini, garlic, olive oil, lemon, salt and spices to craft hummus (the dish), and dried chickpeas get ground with other spices and turned into falafel. Their centrality to the region is no shock: the wild progenitor of chickpeas, Cicer reticulatum, is only found in Turkey today, where it was domesticated. Evidence suggests that chickpeas were one of the earliest cultivated legumes in history, dating back to 7000 BC. 

Chickpeas figure into many dishes across the India subcontinent, and endure as one of the region’s most popular vegetarian ingredients. The legumes get ground into flour, which is widely used in many Indian dishes; it is especially popular as the base of a batter for frying vegetables. In Burma, chickpea flour is turned into a tofu-like product. In France and Italy, chickpea flour is formed into flatbreads—socca in France, and farinata in Italy—that make our hearts sing.

Chickpeas are glorious gifts to humanity. We cannot wait to share with you the four chickpea dishes, plus a welcome garbanzo aperitif, that we have developed for Monday night’s can’t-miss event.

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, August 21 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

We grow many fields of squash, and all of the varieties, from zucchini to pattypan to yellow longneck, yield vast amounts of gorgeous squash blossoms, which we harvest and sell at the market booths and farm store.

One question comes up a lot: How should we prepare squash blossoms? Stuffing and frying them is classic. They also are wonderful in salads, incorporated into quesadillas, blended into pastas and starring in frittatas, among other things. 

We don’t often eat flowers in the United States, but there’s no sensible reason for it. Their flavors can be wonderful, and of course flowers often add beauty to the plate. Squash blossoms taste faintly of squash, and possess an outstanding texture for cooking. They are simultaneously sturdy, supple and capacious, and widely embraced in professional kitchens.

We will have loads of these brilliant orange beauties for weeks. Pick some up, and start cooking! One of the easiest dishes is squash blossom enchiladas.

To make this arresting dish, widely savored across Mexico, heat a skillet and add a little vegetable oil to the pan. Place a flour tortilla in the hot skillet and scatter about 1/3 of a cup of shredded mozzarella and two tablespoons of a queso fresco cheese evenly over the top. A little sliced green onion scattered over the cheese adds welcome crunch and zing to the dish. Then lay a few squash blossoms on one side of the tortilla, and fold the other side over the blossom-spangled half of the tortilla. Cook for a few minutes, flipping it occasionally, until both sides are crisp and golden. Slice it into wedges, and serve.

Meanwhile, we plan to lard our booths with quite a bounty of organic vegetables and meats from livestock that grazed on organic pasture at the weekend markets!

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Fennel
• Mint
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Sunflower bouquets 
• Leeks
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Carrots
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Cuts of lamb

Farm Store

Not up for enduring the heat at Saturday’s market? We understand. You can park right in front of our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road and walk away with armfuls of organic vegetables, meats from livestock that grazed on organic pasture, provisions and foods crafted by our culinary team and a wide range of products from local artisans. The heat? It barely interfered with your quick Farm Store visit.

Please visit us at the Farm Store, located at 4975 Jay Road and open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for:

• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Mint
• Fennel 
• Sunflower bouquets
• Onions
• Carrots
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Leeks
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread

Meats

• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chips tortilla chips
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Green tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• BeeOch beard and body care products
• Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
• Vital You toner mists, soaps
• Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen

Bramble & Hare

Farm tomato soup—the star ingredient comes from our farm. Farm gnocchi—Black Cat Organic Farm potatoes. Beet salad, our beets. Fried green tomatoes starring our organic fruit. Spring onion risotto with Detroit beets and braised fennel from the farm. The summer squash and cherry tomatoes in the pan-seared salmon dish, the red pepper, onions and turnips in the braised rabbit leg, and the polenta, celery and salsa components in the beef dish—all from our organic farm.

No other restaurant in the United States comes close to Bramble & Hare when it comes to alignment between farm and table. We’d love to take care of you in this Colorado treasure. As the harvest season continues to ramp up, the menus change with even more regularity and oomph. 

See you soon!

Happy Friday, friends.

A day in the life of the most ambitious farm-to-table operation in the United States normally includes tasks that are entirely foreign to restaurants—and often to farms, too.

Consider our harvest this week of black chickpeas, called kala channa in Hindi (kala means black, and channa means chickpeas). We plant these beauties in the spring in our organic fields. In early summer orange flowers emerge on the green shrub-like plants. Then seed pods emerge, and the peas form. The farm team harvests some of them fresh, but allows most of the plants to dry in the fields. And then they harvest the chickpeas, which get stored at our restaurant Bramble & Hare. The culinary team turns to the long-lasting dried chickpeas across the year.

Could we have bought organic kala channa and had it shipped to Bramble? Of course. But that’s not how we roll unless there’s no way we could grow the ingredient. Lemons? Olives? Pistachios? We source them from outstanding farmers. But most of what we bring into our kitchens and serve to you comes from our own fields. We grow more than 250 varieties of vegetables, legumes, grains, herbs and flowers on our 420 acres.

Visit us this weekend at Bramble & Hare, our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road and our Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont on Saturday to savor the many gorgeous things we grow in our USDA Certified Organic fields.

And remember to look up into the sky, especially Saturday night and early Sunday, for what could be a majestic Perseid meteor shower. The streaks of light we observe come from the comet Swift-Tuttle. When Earth nears the comet’s orbit, bits of rock and debris from the comet land in our atmosphere and burn, creating the arresting light show. With the moon now a waning crescent sliver, moonlight is barely competing with light from the Perseids. Last year’s Perseid’s took place during a bright full moon. This weekend, look up!

August 14 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Green Tomatoes

Red tomatoes invite us to dream of pasta sauce and pan con tomate, of gazpacho, ratatouille, BLTs and a pleasing parade of other dishes. Jalepeños ignite visions of salsa, curries, banh mi sandwiches, jalapeño cheddar corn bread and spicy margaritas. 

Green tomatoes? Our culinary fantasies often begin, and end, with fried green tomatoes. The classic preparation—tomato slices covered with flour, dipped in whisked eggs and milk, and then dredged in cornmeal and bread crumbs and fried in oil—beguiles us every time we craft it. But there’s far more to green tomatoes than hot, crisp slices. Especially when the tomatoes are heirloom varieties, and naturally redolent with flavor. 

Colorado does not occupy the heart of the bullseye for tomato-cultivating excellence. The final product, the tomatoes, taste outstanding, rivaling those grown in more tomato-happy locales. But with its cool nights and relatively short growing season, tomato harvesting in Colorado doesn’t really get started until the middle of August, and then ends with the first frost, normally in early October. 

The situation yields quite a lot of green tomatoes. They have become an important side crop at Black Cat Organic Farm, one we cherish.

The culinary team has thrilled to the satisfying green tomato challenge, devoting hours this week to exploring the flavor and textural advantages of our many varieties of heirloom tomatoes that haven’t quite yet reached peak ripeness. They’ve come up with four beautiful courses for Monday night’s celebration, plus a green tomato-oriented welcome aperitif. This is a night for both green tomato enthusiasts and skeptics. Prepare to get wowed! And get ready to make your friends who don’t show up green with envy.

An aside: Please let us know in advance if you have any dietary restrictions before attending a Harvest Celebration dinner. Thank you!

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, August 14 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

Summer squash season is upon us. For the next few months, witness a burgeoning bounty of the fruit and its myiad colors, shapes and textures.  We love slicing them into rounds and baking them with Parmesan cheese. So simple, and delicious. Baked with garlicky breadcrumbs in a casserole dish? Yes, please. Sauteed until caramelized and then paired with lemon for a pasta dish? You bet. Squash fries, squash bread, squash lasagna, squash and salmon baked in foil, grilled squash, squash enchiladas, squash kebabs, pickled squash, ratatouille, squash chips, squash-stuffed ravioli. We could go on, but you get the idea. This is one versatile vegetable. And we’ll  have organic squash at the Markets into October, if not later. 

Visit us at the Markets on Saturday in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.) and snag a bunch of organic squash, along with many other agricultural treasures, from tomatoes to greens to onions, herbs, carrots, fava beans and much more.

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Fennel
• Mint
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Squash blossoms
• Tomatoes
• Sunflower bouquets 
• Fava beans
• Leeks
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Carrots
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Roving wool from our sheep
• Cuts of lamb

Farm Store

Interested in spending your days surrounded by just-harvested and organic vegetables, legumes, grains, herbs and flowers? In serving our many happy customers for whom a visit to the Black Cat Farm Store is a weekly highlight? Our Farm Store is one of the happiest patches of Boulder County, and we are looking for a new team member. If you or someone you know might be interested, we’d love to hear from you! Head to blackcatboulder.com, click on the “Information” tab and scroll down to job opening to learn more and apply.

Please visit us at the Farm Store, located at 4975 Jay Road and open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for:

• Squash blossoms
• Potatoes 
• Peppers
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Mint
• Fennel 
• Sunflower bouquets
• Fava beans
• Onions
• Carrots
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Leeks
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread

Meats

• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chips tortilla chips
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Green tahini spreads
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• BeeOch beard and body care products
• Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
• Vital You toner mists, soaps
• Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen

Bramble & Hare

Menus at the nation’s most true farm-to-table restaurant revolve largely around the things we grow on our 425-acre organic Boulder farm. We raise livestock on organic pasture, and cultivate more than 250 varieties of organic and heirloom vegetables, grains, legumes, herbs and flowers. 

But we can’t trace the provenance of every ingredient to the farm. If we limited the menu to Black Cat Organic Farm, we’d have to say goodbye to cooking oils, dairy products (butter!), citrus fruits, nuts, olives and more. That includes fish.

Our approach lets us offer dishes like the pan-seared salmon dish, with red quinoa, summer squash, marinated cherry tomatoes and Romesco sauce. The squash, tomatoes and Romesco ingredients all come from the farm, but not the salmon. So most of this dish is true farm-to-table, with ingredients raised in soil just miles away from Bramble & Hare. The whole dish is wonderful.

The Bramble menu changes nearly every day, especially for the next few months, as so many new vegetables finally ripen and get harvested.

Pay us a visit soon. We look forward to decorating your evening and week with exquisite food, most of which came directly from our fields.

Happy Friday, friends.

This young month’s on again, off again monsoons interrupt time spent in the fields cultivating, harvesting and planting. But our more than 60 acres of crops don’t mind the intermittent rainfall. Every drop helps. And as the planting for now is muted, with cultivation and harvesting commanding most of our attention, it doesn’t interfere much with the life of the farm. 

We have lots to share with you all weekend at our booths at the Boulder County Farmers Market stands in Boulder and Longmont, and at our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road, open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Meanwhile, our culinary team at Bramble & Hare is performing alchemy on the harvests, turning so many organic vegetables into variations on a theme of spun gold.

Enjoy the weekend!

August 7 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Potatoes

They’re crazy for potatoes in Ireland, mad for the spud in Eastern Europe (Belarus is No. 1 per capita worldwide for potato consumption) and nutso for the root vegetable in Peru, where it is native. In fact, Peru supports more than 4,000 (!) varieties of potato. We dream of a potato-munching tour across the beautiful country.

We grow several varieties. During our more than 15 years of farming, we’ve figured out a range of potatoes that taste wonderful, offer a diversity of textures and flavors and thrive in Colorado. The alignment between Colorado and potatoes is not forced. Potato farmers in the state rank fifth in the nation for production of the vegetable, yielding more than 2 billion pounds a year.

Potatoes are vital culinary partners. Everybody loves them cut into batons, dunked in hot oil, and transformed into French fries. Roasting them draws out gorgeous caramelized flavors and crisp textures. Boiled potatoes are fabulous slathered in butter and showered with salt. Mashed, hash browned, home fried, incorporated into stews and soups, used as a lid for dishes like shepherd’s pie—no matter the use, they can sing.

The key is quality potatoes. We’ve got that covered. And for the next few months, beginning now, we’ll be offering just-harvested potatoes, which offer especially spellbinding flavors.

Meanwhile, the hospitality team is eager to once again invite guests to order simply “white” or “red” wines, all of which have been curated by our outstanding sommelier Logan to complement our evening’s dinner, which arrive wrapped in burlap. Diners who participate in the engaging challenge then receive the sort of taste, aroma, color and texture scorecards that sommeliers use to understand wine, and to take part in blind tastings. From there, guests have fun exploring the wines and guessing at their varietals, countries of origin and more. 

At each of our dinners, the sommelier game has captured the imaginations of guests who signed up; we love watching them having fun tasting and talking about the wine, and then researching the wines once they learned their identity.

Not interested in using the sommelier’s grid during dinner? No problem. You can order the bottles of wine that Logan selected to pair with the meal, or you can work with a server to discover something you love on the wine list, or turn to cocktails and other beverages. Either way, we cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room in downtown Boulder and share four courses of culinary excellence with you.

The celebration, on Monday, August 7 in our convivial dining room, costs $87, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages. When making a reservation, it is important to include dietary restrictions, so we can best accommodate; we rely mostly on the fruits of our fields for our dishes, and while accommodating dietary restrictions is something we do with pleasure, it is especially helpful in our case to have a little bit of advance notice.

Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont

Peppers have arrived! While the bounty remains tidy, it does not presage a season of pepper paltriness. We’re just getting started with these early peppers; soon, you’ll find them spilling out of baskets at our Market booths. We grew many different varieties this year, from our beloved shishitos, which we raise in abundance, to Hungarian wax, jalapeño, fushimis and many more. 

At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:

• Potatoes Potatoes (New!)
• Peppers (New!)
• Fennel
• Mint
• Celery 
• Tomatillos
• Squash blossoms
• Tomatoes
• Sunflower bouquets 
• Fava beans
• Leeks
• Onions
• Tat soi
• Snap peas
• Carrots
• Mizuna, green and purple 
• Romaine lettuce
• Spring Onions
• Salad mix
• Kale
• Sourdough bread
• Roving wool from our sheep

Farm Store

Our customer-facing refrigerators filled with our super-popular greens quickly became a crowd favorite. When you visit us now, you can fill your own bag with greens; in fact, most of our vegetables now are available for customers to select themselves, rather than waiting for Store staff to retrieve them. The Store gets quite busy, and this new arrangement makes the experience more efficient and speedy. 

Please visit us at the Farm Store, located at 4975 Jay Road and open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for:

• Potatoes (New!)
• Peppers (New! Beginning Saturday)
• Celery
• Tomatillos
• Tomatoes
• Mint
• Fennel 
• Sunflower bouquets
• Fava beans
• Onions
• Carrots
• Kale
• Tat soi
• Lettuces
• Green mustard
• Leeks
• Salad mix
• Mizuna
• Mushrooms
• Chicken eggs
• Duck eggs
• Guinea eggs

Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes

• Sourdough bread
• Popcorn
• Flours from Black Cat Organic Farm grains
• Dried beans
• Ancient grains

Meats

• Sausages
• Grama Grass & Livestock Beef
• Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
• Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
• Dog food

Black Cat Farm Provisions

• Flourless chocolate cake with mousse
• Carrot cake
• Onion soup
• Roasted tomato sauce with basil and garlic
• Basque piperade
• Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
• Tomato shallot fonduto
• Salsa amarilla con rajas
• Spicy harissa
• Ketchup

Local Provisions

• Big B’s Organic Apple Cider Vinegar
• Bibamba chocolates
• Taos Bakes Cosmo Nuts
• Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter 
• Full Stop Bakery Sourdough Crackers
• Humble Suds cleaning products
• Growing Organic probiotic soaps
• Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles 
• Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
• Boulder Broth
• Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
• Boulder Valley Honey
• Bolder Chip salsa, corn chips and tortillas, and uncooked flour tortillas
• Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
• Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
• Spark + Honey Granola
• Mountain Girl Pickles
• Project Umami Tempeh
• Silver Canyon Coffee
• Gorgeous Italian balsamic vinegar
• Ambrosial Italian apple cider vinegar
• Vegan charcuterie from Greece 
• Italian risotto rice

Bramble & Hare

Menus at the nation’s most true farm-to-table restaurant revolve largely around the things we grow on our 425-acre organic Boulder farm. We raise livestock on organic pasture, and cultivate more than 250 varieties of organic and heirloom vegetables, grains, legumes, herbs and flowers. 

But we can’t trace the provenance of every ingredient to the farm. If we limited the menu to Black Cat Organic Farm, we’d have to say goodbye to cooking oils, dairy products (butter!), citrus fruits, nuts, olives and more. That includes fish.

Our approach lets us offer dishes like the pan-seared salmon dish, with red quinoa, summer squash, marinated cherry tomatoes and Romesco sauce. The squash, tomatoes and Romesco ingredients all come from the farm, but not the salmon. So most of this dish is true farm-to-table, with ingredients raised in soil just miles away from Bramble & Hare. The whole dish is wonderful.

The Bramble menu changes nearly every day, especially for the next few months, as so many new vegetables finally ripen and get harvested.

Pay us a visit soon. We look forward to decorating your evening and week with exquisite food, most of which came directly from our fields.