Celery is a Flavor-Packed Star at Black Cat Farm
Celery is pale, celery is watery, celery broadcasts little in the way of aroma, celery is filler for things like stuffing and crab cakes. When the celery is from the supermarket, all of the above usually applies. But when the celery is just harvested from Black Cat...
Corn Four Ways From Black Cat Farm
We grow two varieties of sweet corn for the restaurants and the farmers’ market, a variety called Silver Queen that Eric and Jill grew up with in Maryland and Virginia and Bonus, which gives us ridiculously sweet baby corn, and then it also gives us large ears of...
James Beard Dinner + Market Bounty = Weekend Culinary Harvest
It’s a weekend meant for savoring the harvest, don’t you think? With fields across Boulder County now enjoying such abundance, it’s the eye of the bullseye for meals revolving around local, local, local. Sweet corn from the cob, and fresh tomatoes simply sliced. Pico...
Carrots Extolled and Explained — And A Recipe
Beets enjoy a devoted fan club, but some tell beets to beat it. Many people turn to turnips with smiles, but others quickly turn away. Some of us loudly root for rutabagas, but the root vegetable also attracts unruly mobs fixed on giving rutabagas the boot. It’s not...
Onions Thrive in Colorado — and on Black Cat Farm
Did you know that Colorado is the national epicenter for storage onion production in the United States? That the National Onion Association is in Greeley? Most of us within the Black Cat diaspora had no idea, but of course Eric was on top of it — he’s the one who...
Fresh Potatoes Swoon-Worthy — So Is Recipe
Roasted, fried, boiled, baked. Cold, and in a salad. Piping hot, mashed and infused with butter. Shredded. Diced. Pureed. Served whole. Is there anything a cook can’tdo with a potato? Many view them as little more than reliable year-round culinary stalwarts...
Front Range Fennel is Good Fortune on Black Cat Farm
A year goes by, and you tasted fennel seed in Italian sausage, perhaps some Indian food. The bulb? Fronds? Maybe you had a bowl of bouillabaisse (but probably not), or a tomato sauce for pasta in which the constituent parts included sliced and sautéed fennel bulb....
Summer Squash Blossoms Are Here — With Recipe
The triple-digit heat that struck this week taxes the acres upon acres (more than 40 of them) that we cultivate for vegetables, and we irrigate like mad to keep them healthy and happy. At the same time, the heat also speeds-up the ripening of treasured plants like...
Rain, Rain Come Again
The fires dotting the state, including the Lake Christine Fire that continues to threaten the great town of Basalt in the Roaring Fork Valley, make our hearts ache. This is one parched, sun-blasted summer, and the forecast calls for more of the same. The weather, of...
Concrete Slab Plucks at Heart Strings
We fill bins with brilliant-yellow mustard flowers that perch beside bins showcasing purple-hued heads of lettuce, tangles of serrated mizuna leaves, piles of white-blossomed fava bean tops. We spend atmospheric days amongst pigs and piglets — recently, we watched 11...
Happy Pigs, Artichokes in Cocktails
As you probably know by now, we are kind of pig-crazy here at Black Cat Farm. They take care of us in so many ways — and we take care of them, too. June, which begins today (yay!), always marks the beginning of a parade of months during which our Mulefoots spend...
Big Week on Black Cat Farm — Sheep Shearing
Another week at the farm, another parade of activity. Even during the heart of summer, when the weeks seem to blend into one another with their similarity — 87 degrees, sunny, if we are lucky several afternoon thunderstorms — they in fact are quite different. New...
Asparagus Rising + Turnips + Radishes + Rain + Sunshine = Goodness
Happy Glorious Friday, Black Catters and Brambleites! This is almost sinfully luscious weather, yes? Smack on the heels of two days of cool and rain, it’s perfect for one of our favorite pursuits — growing vegetables. We started the day early in the fields and toiled...
Farm-To-Table Burgers, Lamb, Salads Hit Market
We have considered it for years, and finally it is a lively reality at the Farmers’ Market: Just as we craft and serve food in our restaurants, now we are doing the same at the Market. Pork burgers from our heritage Mulefoot pigs. Lamb ragout, from our big flock of...
Youthful Arrivals on Black Cat Farm
Another week of wind, some sun and now rain. Snow on tap for tonight, too. That means another week on the farm in April. Either way, the plants seem awfully happy in their little nests of soil. With the exception of things that we over-wintered, and have written...
Windy Week, Bountiful Market Harvest
Is wind fun? We think not. We think only two kinds of people like wind: people who are crazy for kites, and sailors. That leaves billions and billions of people on earth who do not like wind. Wind assailed Boulder for much of the week, lifting soil and grit from the...
Buh-Bye Snow, Hello 2018 Boulder Farmers’ Market
As snowflakes hurtle towards the grass, gardens, sidewalks and streets, the weather today does not exactly scream “farmers’ market!” Instead, you are contemplating soup. A lively fire. Tea. Go for them all tonight, and consider adding something red and warming, too. A...
Spring is Transformation Time on the Farm
Stocking our restaurants with year-round farm food demands strategies — we do live in Colorado, after all. If something is capable of undergoing preservation in such a way that flavor is maintained (if not transformed in an excellent way), then we preserve. So...
The Farm Team Reunites for the Season Ahead
We could do without the wind — the physics that turns air tactile is not our farm friend. And we all could use more moisture, especially in the mountains. The snowier those peaks, the more reliable and abundant our summer and fall irrigation. But we will take the...
Flowering Hon Tsai Tai and Arugula in Winter
You might think after a winter of cleaning pig stalls and taking care of piglets and lambs, of moving fences and corraling sows, of sweeping snow from row cover and cleaning arugula in 20-something weather and slipping across alternately ice-crusted and mud-soggy...
Winter On The Farm Leads to Seed — And Geese
Planting from seed? Not yet. Massive harvests? Soon, but for now the vegetable bounty is minimal. Plowing fields, dealing with irrigation, wrestling with pests? Nope, negative, not one bit. The plant part of our farm equation now rests, for the most part. But not for...
Lambs and Ewes, Sows and Piglets on Black Cat Farm
They have been arriving nearly every day since December, the tiny lambs. Their moms, the ewes, have been heavy with offspring, in many cases twins, for months; the gestation for lambs is 152 days, give or take. Now lambs totter around the fields on those unsteady,...
Stop By Tonight at Bramble for Austin’s Last Night
Today marks two years to the day since Austin Elsborg started roasting beets, wizarding ambrosial barbecue sauce for pork and turning out some of the finest tavern food in Colorado at Bramble & Hare. All from a kitchen the size of a food truck. The anniversary is...
Black Cat is Devil Proof — And Cheery With Krug, Too
The new bottles of California Malbec thrill the Black Cat family not just because the wine is superb. We cherish and champion the Sonoma County elixir, too, because winemaker Jesse Katz grew up in Boulder, and originals of his father Andy Katz’s spectacular...
Head To The Final Market of 2017
It arrives on a Friday every year, and the profound sense of bittersweet returns the next day, too. It is the Friday and Saturday immediately prior to Thanksgiving, which always marks our last harvest for the farmers’ market in downtown Boulder as well as the...
Spinach Returns, Plenty of Veggies Still Harvested
The bulk of the harvesting for 2018 is wrapping-up. We spent a good bit of time this week in the field that holds our polenta corn, which has been drying on the stalks since August. Now, we harvest the cobs and deliver them to a barn, where they will dry some more. At...
Farm to Table Pumpkins for Pigs
Sometimes we almost feel like those Japanese ranchers who spend so much time and effort fussing over their Wagyu herds, the kind of cattle that produce kobe beef. We don’t massage our heritage Mulefoot pigs, but we have crowned them kings and queens of the farm....
Farm-to-Table Happens in the Snow
Harvesting crops is never a breezy affair — even on a 72-degree June afternoon with the sky the color of an Adriatic lagoon it presents challenges. It is physically demanding, requiring that we bend over and pull or dig. We fill bins with arugula and Belgian endive,...
Pigs Key to the Life of Biodynamic Farm
It’s been quite the week — especially for our pigs. We raise more than 100 of them, mostly heritage Mulefoots, on one of our properties. They are one of the foundations of Black Cat Farm, which is the only certified biodynamic farm-to-table operation in the United...
Frost and Snow and Sturdy Vegetables
Our first frost in Boulder normally happens somewhere during the first 10 days of October, and sure enough, that's what happened this year. As anticipated, the hard frost whacked the tomatoes, peppers, basil and eggplant for the year, as well as select greens that...
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