Autumn Makes Another Appearance
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 [email protected]. 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.
