Summer is ON
Happy Friday, friends.
We trust you all enjoyed a winning holiday weekend, and now are wading in the summer stream. Picnics. Barbecues. Colorado camping trips. Vacations to places with salt spray, with ancient skinny roads, with unfamiliar languages and rooted culinary traditions and airy, marble-floored expanses filled with paintings, sculptures and antiquities.
Yay, summer.
We look forward to taking care of you at all of our outlets across the weekend: our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road; our booths at Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont on Saturday; and at Bramble & Hare, the most true farm-to-table restaurant in the United States.
In addition, we are eager to invite you into Bramble & Hare on the evening of Monday, July 10 for our next Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner, which champions broccoli. Read on for more about this special event.
Happy summer!
July 10 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Broccoli
Here we are exploring vegetable history and once again, per usual, the vegetable’s most salient roots find purchase in Italy. The word first appeared in the 17th century, as the plural form of the Italian word broccolo, meaning the flowering crest of a cabbage.
In fact broccoli, like cabbage, is a crop from the Brassica genus. While the genus enjoys a variety of species, one species, Brassica oleracea, yields a diversity of cultivars that command attention in kitchens from Boulder to Brazil to Bangladesh: kale, cabbage, collard greens, cauliflower, kai-lan, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and yes, broccoli. All of these cultivars dwell within the same species. As a result, hybridization happens with ease. For example broccolini, which we increasingly find in grocery produce sections, is a simple cross between broccoli and kai-lan (which we grow!).
People in Italy cooked broccoli with abandon, and are largely responsible for bringing it to the United States in the 19th century. Thanks, Italians! Most of the broccoli we encounter worldwide is grown in China and India; together, they produce 74% of the world’s total. California, where it grows year-round, produces about 95% of the broccoli produced in the United States.
But every last scrap of broccoli you will savor at Bramble & Hare on Monday night spends its entire life in organic Boulder soil before reaching your plate. Our broccoli, thriving under Colorado sun and this year’s abundance of rain, broadcasts outstanding flavor and textures that simultaneously manifest as supple and crisp. The culinary team has been experimenting with it all week, and cannot wait begin sending dishes to your table.
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, July 10 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
A fair bit of what we do revolves around weed suppression—especially when we have precipitation-heavy springs and early summers. As Black Cat Organic Farm is USDA certified organic, that means pesticides and herbicides never touch the land we cultivate. As a result, getting rid of weeds requires quite a bit of human labor, along with some measure of letting go of notions that the farm should be weed-free. We yank the ones that interfere most directly with plant vigor. But toiling to make Black Cat Organic Farm look like a sprawling conventional soybean farm in Iowa—a landscape of genetically modified crops rising from weed-free and utterly dead (aka, poisoned) soil—makes no sense, even if it were possible through aggressive weeding. So we co-exist with them, and nurture soil crawling with life. The vegetables that grow tall and stout in our soil contain a wealth of nutrients, and taste bold. Supermarket veggies too often taste wan, like ghosts of vegetables.
Between pulling weeds and harvesting, we are busy! And we also are thrilled to finally bring fava beans, English peas and snap peas to the markets. You can munch these young favas whole—no need to liberate the beans from their jackets. Ditto for the sweet English peas.
We will be here for you at our stands on Saturday at Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.)
At our booths this week, look for:
- Fava beans
- English peas
- Snap peas
- Carrots
- Onions
- Chocolate mint
- Cardoons
- Fava tops
- Magenta turnips
- Mizuna, green and purple
- Romaine lettuce
- Arugula
- Spring Onions
- Salad mix
- Kale
- Sourdough bread
- Roving wool from our sheep
Farm Store
The farmers markets are open for just hours on Saturdays. But our Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. And at the Farm Store you’ll find organic vegetables from our fields, meats from livestock raised on organic pasture, foods prepared by our culinary team (including always warm sourdough bread) and provisions crafted by local artisans.
Please visit us at the Farm Store this week for:
- Fava beans
- English peas
- Snap peas
- Onions
- Carrots
- Mint
- Kale
- Lettuces
- Green mustard
- Magenta turnips
- Cardoons
- Fava tops
- Scallions
- Arugula
- 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
This recent menu features a favorite vegetable, snap peas, which we are harvesting now. Combined with pistachio tarator and pickled onions, it’s the kind of dish somebody orders, everybody at the table tries, and soon diners request another round of these addictive treats. It also showcases carrot ginger soup, leveraging just-harvested carrots that we planted in spring. With crème fraiche and pepitas, it’s simple and outstanding.
No matter what direction you take the meal at Bramble & Hare, you can trust that in most cases the majority of ingredients came from our farm. Desserts are generally not as farm-to-table oriented as the rest of the menu—we don’t raise sugarcane, we don’t grow nut trees, dairy is not a part of our operation, and most our fruit harvest for now remains awfully tidy (we planted many fruit trees, however, and one day they will yield lots of apples, pears, plums and more). But we do grow our own heritage wheat, and mill it into flour. And we always hunt for ways to up the local with desserts. Our carrot bread, for example, is largely comprised of Black Cat Organic Farm ingredients.
Please join us soon at Bramble & Hare! The fields now are yielding an immensity of organic vegetables, and the bounty will grow heavier and more diverse between now and the first hard frost.
