Happy Friday, friends.
The forecast suggests that the monsoon season is now arriving. So long, weeks of dry and hot. And hello eruptions of rain and cool.
It’s a late start, but meteorologists predicted that, this being an El Niño year, the (mostly) annual pattern of late-afternoon thunderstorms would arrive somewhere in August, rather than July. We’ll take it. And we are quite pleased that the return of precipitation waited until we had harvested a lot of hay this week. If the fields had been sodden, we would have postponed driving the sickle bar mower into the fields, scything the hay and then turning it into big blocks of winter food for our sheep.
We’ve got a thrilling Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner on tap next week: summer beans. Read all about it below. In addition, we’ll be at the Boulder County Farmers Markets in Boulder and Longmont, rain or shine, on Saturday morning and early afternoon. The Farm Store at 4975 Jay Road is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. top 5 p.m., and as with our Market booths it’s loaded with organic veggies from our fields, as well as myriad other delights. And finally, Bramble & Hare is open Monday through Saturday for dinner service. The harvest bounty we are witnessing today gets sent to the culinary savants in the kitchen, who transform it all into sublime dishes for your pleasure. We hope to see you there.
Enjoy the cool weekend!
August 28 Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner: Summer beans
Most of what we call summer beans find their foundation in the same species, Phaseolus coccineus. But just as the species for tomatoes, Solanum lycopersicum, yields a dizzying diversity of fruit shapes, colors, textures and flavors, so do summer beans come in a broad range of styles. These glorious vegetables take center stage on Monday’s Harvest Celebration Dirt Dinner. One request: When you make reservations, please alert us to any dietery restrictions.
We plant fields of summer beans every year. The flavors can dazzle, and beans offer an excellent side benefit: They fix nitrogen in the soil. We always make sure to cultivate nitrogen fixers among our fields, and keep track of which ones held them, and when. Black Cat Organic Farm supports more than 250 varieties of vegetables, and hews to organic and regenerative agricultural practices. Leveraging nitrogen fixers in different fields every year ensures that, over the course of several seasons, all of our acreage receives assists from plants like beans that extract nitrogen from the air—thanks to bacteria on the plants’ roots—and converts it into food for plants.
Summer beans are native to Central and South America. Evidence reveals indigenous peoples across Mexico and Peru have been cultivating them for thousands of years. Today, the species includes more than 130 cultivars: Derby and Golden Wax, Rocquencourt and Triomphe de Farcy, Algarve and Trionfo Violetto.
We plant numerous cultivars. Some are green, some yellow. Certain cultivars are speckled and purple, and others are mottled cranberry and white. All of them are delicious.
Bramble’s culinary team has been obsessing over preparations all week. We cannot wait to welcome you into our dining room and, over the course of the evening, bring you four courses inspired by summer beans, plus a welcome aperitif.
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, August 28 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
Finally—basil! We grow a few varieties of basil, and are thrilled that Black Cat Organic Farm will offer one of our favorite herbs at our Boulder County Farmers Market booths on Saturday in Boulder (8 a.m. to 2 p.m.) and Longmont (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.).
Start hunting for basil-flecked pasta recipes, and getting ready to make lots of pesto. Some stir-fries, like the Taiwanese classic three cup chicken, call for fistfuls of basil—we’ve got you covered. We savor a BLT with a few basil leaves between the slices. A Caprese salad with out basil is not a Caprese salad, pizza is always improved by basil leaves, and the herb makes for an outstanding cocktail garnish, too.
A tip: When making pesto (for which pine nuts are good but unnecessary—more affordable nuts like walnuts also yield pesto excellence), drop a few ice cubes into the blender or food processor. The frozen cubes shock the basil leaves in such a way that the pesto remains bright green, rather than mud colored, long after you’re done crafting the pesto.
In addition, we now will have cucumbers and eggplant at the Market! And we’ll be offering these gems until the first frost, normally in early October.
At our booths this week, which are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Boulder and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Longmont, look for:
- Basil (New!)
- Summer beans (New!)
- Cucumbers (New!)
- Eggplant (New!)
- Squash blossoms
- Potatoes
- Peppers
- Fennel
- Mint
- Celery
- Tomatillos
- Tomatoes
- Sunflower bouquets
- Leeks
- Onions
- Tat soi
- Carrots
- Mizuna, green and purple
- Romaine lettuce
- Salad mix
- Kale
- Roving wool from our sheep
- Cuts of lamb
Farm Store
If Saturday morning brings rain and gloom and you’d rather skip the farmers markets, don’t forget about the Farm Store, at 4975 Jay Road. The Store is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and offers everything we bring to the farmers markets—and much more. Here, you’ll find culinary provisions like ketchup, Basque piperade, salsas, French onion soup and much more, crafted by our culinary team. You’ll find provisions such as gluten-free bread, tempeh, honey and veggie burgers made by local artisans.
And now, a smart new fence rings the Farm Store parking lot. Stay tuned for more and more improvements at the Farm Store across the year.
Among other things, we are heavy with peppers this year. Some are quite spicy. Most of our varieties, however, are mild. One simple preparation for peppers that lean into mild, but also contain a little bite (e.g., shishitos, espalettes, fushimis) is popping them into a hot skillet with olive oil or a neutral oil like sunflower, showering with salt, and moving them around in the pan until they are blistered. The next step? Eat. For a Japanese twist, use a little soy sauce instead of salt, add toasted sesame oil to the pan just before serving, speckle with roasted sesame seeds and serve. So good.
Please visit us at the Farm Store, located at 4975 Jay Road and open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., for:
- Basil (New!)
- Cucumbers (New!)
- Eggplant (New!)
- Summer beans (New!)
- Squash blossoms
- Potatoes
- Peppers
- Celery
- Tomatillos
- Tomatoes
- Mint
- Fennel
- Sunflower bouquets
- Onions
- Carrots
- Kale
- Tat soi
- Lettuces
- Green mustard
- Leeks
- Salad mix
- Mizuna
- Mushrooms
- Chicken eggs
- Duck eggs
- Guinea eggs
Black Cat Grains and flours and legumes
- Sourdough bread
Meats
- Cuts of Black Cat heritage lamb
- Cuts of Black Cat Organic Farm pork
- Dog food
Black Cat Farm Provisions
- 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
- Frog Hollow Farmstead Apple Butter
- 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 Chips tortilla chips
- Pueblo Seed Grains Co. cookies, cereals, grits and more
- Heartbeets Veggie Burgers and doggie treats
- Spark + Honey Granola
- Green tahini spreads
- Mountain Girl Pickles
- Project Umami Tempeh and bacon
- Silver Canyon Coffee
- Vegan charcuterie from Greece
- Italian risotto rice
- Humble Suds cleaning products
- Growing Organic probiotic soaps
- BeeOch beard and body care products
- Purple Fence Farm salves, beard oils
- Vital You toner mists, soaps
- Bjorn’s face wash and sunscreen
Bramble & Hare
Farm tomato soup—the star ingredient comes from our farm. Farm gnocchi—Black Cat Organic Farm potatoes. Beet salad, our beets. Fried green tomatoes starring our organic fruit. Spring onion risotto with Detroit beets and braised fennel from the farm. The summer squash and cherry tomatoes in the pan-seared salmon dish, the red pepper, onions and turnips in the braised rabbit leg, and the polenta, celery and salsa components in the beef dish—all from our organic farm.
No other restaurant in the United States comes close to Bramble & Hare when it comes to alignment between farm and table. We’d love to take care of you in this Colorado treasure. As the harvest season continues to ramp up, the menus change with even more regularity and oomph.
See you soon!
