Happy Thursday, friends.
We can’t wait to visit with you Saturday morning at the kick-off of the 2023 Boulder County Farmers Market in downtown Boulder from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and a new one for Black Cat Organic Farm — the market in Longmont — from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. The forecast suggests climatic glory, and based on the vitality of our fields this year, we can guarantee jaw-dropping majesty on offer at our expansive booth.
We’ll have just-harvested greens, leafy treasures flooded with sugars; nothing beats spring greens. Our Chantenay carrots (see below about our upcoming dinner starring the carrots) are wonderful beauties, packed with flavor and like the greens, sultry with sweetness. The beets are magnificent, too. Look for these and plenty more, including our sourdough bread, at the spectacle of awesomeness that is the Boulder County Farmers Market. We have a booth at both markets every Saturday, and when the Boulder market opens up for Wednesdays, later in May, we’ll have a booth there, too.
Our new booth at the Longmont market delivers extra excitement this year. We have always loved the market, and this year we decided to commit to a booth and a weekly presence at that cheerful patch of Boulder County. If you’re a Longmonter or just checking out the booming city’s large market, we’d love to chat food and farming. Hello, Longmont — we are thrilled to be here!
We also are participating in a fun promotion on Saturday, where items for sale scattered around the market will have stickers emblazoned with #Take5forLocal. Snagging goodies with the stickers leads to prizes, including the grand prize (one sticker each at the Boulder and Longmont markets) that offers $250 in market bucks, which you can use to buy food at the markets. Good luck, friends!
Meanwhile, read on for much more information about our upcoming Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner at Bramble & Hare; what’s new at the Farm Store; and general farm goings on.
Enjoy the weekend!
Harvest Celebration “Dirt Dinners” Return to Bramble
A handful of tickets remain for what will be the kick-off of one of Boulder’s more thrilling event series this year, our Monday night Harvest Celebration “Dirt Dinners” at Bramble & Hare.
We look forward to welcoming you into our downtown Boulder dining room this Monday, April 3, for a special night revolving around the Chantenay carrot, a French varietal that Eric first planted years ago and never stopped cultivating. Deciding to forsake growing the Chantenay would be along the lines of figuring out a way to grow gold, and then one day saying, “Gold is overrated. I think this year, we’ll grow aluminum.”
It’s a grand culinary star, and at Monday night’s dinner you will savor four courses that spotlight its grandeur, plus a welcome Chantenay-inspired aperitif.
The celebration, in our convivial dining room, costs $75, plus tax, gratuity and adult beverages.
Our culinary team cannot wait to begin crafting these Chantenays into beautiful dishes for you, and our savvy and gracious hospitality crew is eager to take care of you.
Join us!
Bramble & Hare & Black Cat Welcome New Pastry Chef!
We are thrilled to announce that Truly Withorn will be joining the team! With the addition of this pastry and baking savant, we will be able to expand our pastry program at both Bramble & Hare and the Farm Store.
Truly, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America’s esteemed pastry and baking program, grew up on a farm in Kentucky that raised goats, as well as herbs and vegetables. After eight years of professional culinary work, she has moved to Colorado with her dog, a Labradoodle named Tucker, and has already started crafting spectacular dishes. Her favorite dessert to make? An entremet cake, which involves different components assembled into layers, shellacked with mousse, wrapped in glaze and speckled with decorations.
For now, Truly’s orange cake with farm beet mousse is available at the Farm Store. Swing by soon for this wonder — it’s available for a limited time.
Welcome, Truly!
Popular Bookcliff Barrel Tasting Dinner Next Month
Eric is thrilled to be involved with an upcoming event at Bookcliff Vineyards, the wines of which have been poured since Eric and Jill opened their first restaurant, Black Cat Bistro, more than 15 years ago.
We invite you to join us next month for Bookcliff Vineyards’ Annual Barrel Tasting Dinner, the award-winning Boulder winery’s most popular dinner of the year and always a sell-out.
This is your opportunity to taste the emerging wines as they age in the barrels, as well as compare wine matured in different types of barrels. Each course will present a different variety of grape with two or three wines made from that variety, with the difference between them being the barrel in which each wine is aged, or the vineyard used to source the grapes.
This is a five-course sit-down dinner and the wines will be paired with glorious dishes prepared by Eric. Two dates are available for you to choose from. Don’t miss this one-of-a-kind experience; get your tickets now.
Date: Friday April 28, and Saturday, April 29
Time: 6 p.m.
Cost: $120 per person, plus tax
The Black Cat Organic Farm CSA
If you haven’t signed up for our 2023 CSA yet, spots still remain. Our CSA differs from most: Instead of us filling sacks or baskets with vegetables for you to pick up, for our CSA we invite you to visit the Farm Store 20 times between June and October and fill Black Cat CSA totes with produce. In addition, CSA members enjoy 5% discounts on all store items, plus a bonus U-Pick credit based on share size.
The link contains loads more information about how the CSA works, as well as a way to sign-up. Welcome to the Black Cat family.
Farm Store
Here’s a thing to do if you go full farm-to-table: Plant 20,000 chamomile plants for the sake of herbal tea. That was one of our many farm tasks this week. We can’t wait for them all to grow tall and bushy; the aroma intoxicates.
This week, we also planted 10,000 tomato and 10,000 pepper plants in the greenhouse. Meanwhile, our celery and celeriac starts look wonderful, we are beginning to fill the greenhouse with flower and herb starts, and the harvests of candy-sweet Chantenay carrots and over-wintered beets are stunning.
And with Truly now a part of the team, we’ll be offering more and more pastries to the Store, including the orange cake with beet mousse. Another new item, the spaghetti squash stuffed with vegetable stew and on a bed of sauteed greens, in the photo above. The meal for two is in the frozen section of the Store, and awesome.
Please visit us at the Farm Store this week for:
- Eggs
- Mushrooms
- Salad mix
- Kale
- Arugula
- Tat Soi
- Spicy mix
- Spinach
- Potatoes
- Beets
- Turnips
- Carrots
- Onions
- Squash
Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes
- Sourdough bread
- Popcorn
- Flours from Black Cat Organic Farm grains
- Dried beans
- Ancient grains
Meats
- Grama Grass & Livestock Beef
- Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
- Pork ribs, pork shops and bacon
Black Cat Farm Provisions
- Spaghetti squash stuffed with vegetable stew on a bed of sauteed greens (New!)
- Orange cake with beet mousse (New!)
- Beef chili (New!)
- Mole (it is BACK!)
- Saag
- Vegetable curry
- Spanakopita
- Onion jam
- French onion soup
- Tomato sauce with basil and garlic
- Basque piperade
- Yellow Tomato Sauce with French thyme
- Salsa amarilla con rajas
- Spicy harissa
- Ketchup
- Carrot cake
- Chocolate cake
Local Provisions
- Mini Moos Goat Cheese
- Frog Hollow Farmstead Crackers with Nettle Salt
- Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter
- Full Stop Bakery Sourdough Crackers
- Tenderfoot Farm Jam
- Plains & Prairie goods
- Humble Suds cleaning products
- Bee-Och Organics tooth powder, muscle pain rub, beard oil, deodorant
- Growing Organic probiotic soaps
- Purple Fence Farm lotions, soaps, bath salts, facial toners and salves
- Annie Bee’s Hand-Poured Beeswax Candles
- Bluecorn Beeswax Candles
- Havenly Baked Gluten-Free Bread
- Boulder Broth
- Bee Grateful Honey Caramels, in chocolate, espresso and salted flavors
- Bjorn’s Colorado Honey and doggie treats
- Boulder Valley Honey
- Bolder Chip salsa, corn chips and tortillas, and uncooked flour tortillas
- Green Tahini dips and dressings
- Pueblo Seed Grains and Seasoning
- Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
- Spark + Honey Granola
- Mountain Girl Pickles
- Project Umami Tempeh
- Silver Canyon Coffee
- French mustard
- Gorgeous Italian balsamic vinegar
- Ambrosial Italian apple cider vinegar
- Vegan charcuterie from Greece
- Italian risotto rice
Bramble & Hare
If you haven’t yet tried our farm gnocchi on the appetizer menu — as a true farm-to-table restaurant, dishes often arrive and then disappear, based on ingredient availability — good news: It’s back. This beauty incorporates our own potatoes and flour, with Bolognese from our neighbor’s beef and a favorite Italian hard cheese, Grana Padano.
The New York Strip steak with samosa-spiced potatoes, saag and Hazel Dell mushrooms recently appeared on the menu, and it’s thrilling. It barely strays from Boulder County, too. The steak comes from a neighbor rancher. The potatoes and spinach in the saag from Black Cat Organic Farm. And the mushrooms from Hazel Dell, in Fort Collins.
A new dessert, coconut milk panna cotta with farm carrot and ginger gelee, with candied walnuts, does not represent a cross-section of Boulder County foods; desserts can offer bigger challenges, although for those that use flour (many of them, across the year) the most abundant ingredient is local, as we grow our own grains and mill them into flour. Nevertheless, this dessert is a beauty, positively popping with tropical coconut and ginger flavors, but then balanced with our own Chantenay carrots along with candied walnuts.
Join us at Bramble! We cannot wait to take care of you in our beautiful dining room.
