Black Cat Farm Dinners Begin
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.
