Fresh Thymes Eatery Customer Appreciation Day!

Since we’re already BFFs, let’s make a day of it! 

You'll enjoy live music at lunch (11-2) from Dechen Hawk and bluegrass music during dinner (6-8), thanks to our friend Dave Pullins and his pickin' 'n' grinnin' friends. Both musicians are not to be missed!
Be sure to try our limited-time dinner special that night, too! And pick up our gluten-free holiday dessert boxes for family, friends, co-workers, and yourself!

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Rocked to sleep as a child to Stevie Wonder, Dechen Hawk's music ranges from beautiful ballads to serious backbeat funk. Hawk's sound is a refreshing new addition to the Neo-Soul movement. Though musical his whole life, it wasn't until the death of his father at age 14, and the search for a way to express that loss, that Hawk found his calling as a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. It was also at this time the Hawk was introduces to the music of Jeff Buckley, which influenced him heavily during this time of grief and musical exploration. Hawk's desire to create and express the joy and fragility of life has kept him busy for the past 20 years performing locally and internationally, sharing billings with such legends as Bruce Hornsby, Leon Russell, R.E.M., Ty Burhoe, Ron Miles, and the Fun Lovin' Criminals. During this time Hawk has written hundreds of songs, released 6 albums, been in numerous bands, played the role of talent buyer for various venues. A 2009 graduate of Naropa University, Hawk studied with Bill Douglas, Art Lande, and Janet Feder.
Dave Pullins 'n' friends have played Fresh Thymes Eatery before, bringing fun, high-energy, and classic bluegrass tunes that'll make your toes tap.

Gluten-Free / Grain-Free Weekly Winter Dinner Specials

Eat well this winter!

Enjoy new mouth-watering dinner entrees every week for four weeks! 

Our weekly winter dinner specials debut Friday, November 13th! 

Bonus: You pick the price you want to pay for the entree. (Really!)

WEEK 1: 11/13 - 11/21

Dinner Special: Pork Ragu 

We’re bringing a Northern Italian classic to Boulder. And it’ll quite possibly become your new winter obsession, because it’s so darn good. Our pork ragu is made with rosemary and red wine sauce, and is topped with gluten-free breadcrumbs. Grain-free pasta is available upon request.

WEEK 2:  11/30 - 12/5

Dinner Special: Tiffany’s Shrimp Tacos 

Finally try Chef Christine’s signature and crowd-wowing dish she made infamous for parties and home entertaining. (Pass the guac!) Includes sustainable, wild-caught shrimp, Abbo’s blue corn tortillas, refried yellow Indian woman beans and cilantro red quinoa.

WEEK 3: 12/7 - 12/10

Dinner Special: Diablo Pasta 

Ain’t nothing better than twirling a mouthful of pasta onto a fork. Unless that pasta is our  one-a-kind savory pasta made with free-range grilled chicken and flavored with Southwest cream sauce (dairy-free, of course!) and oh-so-tasty peppers, onions, spinach, and green chilies. Grain-free pasta is available upon request.

 

WEEK 4: 12/11 - 12/18 

Dinner Special: Korean Short Rib Stew 

This is hot and hearty stew—upgraded. Made with caramelized house-made kimchi and watermelon radish, our Korean Short Rib stew is one big bowl of deliciousness. So, go on—slurp to your heart’s content! 

Note: There won’t be any special dinner entrees the week of Thanksgiving, but you can order gluten-free Thanksgiving turkey, sides, and pies from us!

Fresh Thymes Eatery Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Turkeys, Sides & Pies for Your Holiday Celebration!

Thyme to Gather & Give Thanks!

Make everyone around your holiday table happy this year.

Order your Thanksgiving turkey, sides & pies from us.

 

We’ve got over 10 mouth-watering sides & pies to pick from, though why choose when you can take home one of each?

Orders must be placed by Thursday, November 19th. 

Pick up the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday before Thanksgiving. 

To order, stop in and chat with someone at the counter!

Thanks for having awesome tastebuds! 

*Turkeys and turkey confit available while supplies last. Turkeys are local and free-range.

All sides & pies are grain-free, with the exception of our stuffing and sorghum pie crust. Almond flour crusts available for pies. All our desserts are dairy free. All sides are vegan, with the exception of our turkey gravy and the sausage stuffing.

 

Perfect for Holiday Parties & Winter Weddings: Fresh Thyme Eatery’s Harvest & Ambrosia Boards

With flair and flavor, that’s how we like to do things at Fresh Thymes Eatery, Boulder's 100% gluten-free restaurant that specializes in locally sourced and organic allergen-sensitive food.

And this includes our brand new catering choices debuting just in time for holiday parties and winter weddings—or, really, any event any time of year for anyone with tastebuds. Every single bite is 100% gluten-free, always. 

 

Now ready for your enjoyment: Harvest & Ambrosia Boards!

Every morsel on our new catering boards shows off nature's best and can be customized for dietary preferences, including vegan and paleo.

Our Harvest Board features scrumptious small bites of seasonal veggies, flat breads, house-roasted nuts, hummus, and cured meats. This catering board is ideal for wedding cocktail hours, fundraisers, office parties, and client lunches when you want to impress. 

Our Ambrosia Board features our signature honey-sweetened and dairy-free tasty treats, like chocolate chip cookie balls, magic bars, chocolate muffins, and seasonal fruit. This catering board is a perfect complement to our Harvest Board, offering wedding guests, party attendees, or your entire company a chance to indulge their sweet tooth and try a little bit of everything.

From parties of 6 to 30 or more, our Harvest & Ambrosia Boards are great for special events when you want to please eyeballs, palettes, and appetites. Pricing starts at $80.  

Call Fresh Thymes Eatery today at 303-955-7988 or email catering@freshthymeseatery.com to learn more.

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Fresh Thymes Eatery serves righteously delicious food for ingredient-conscious eaters. We specialize in gluten-free and allergen-sensitive food that's locally sourced, grass-fed, pasture-raised, organic & made with love. Because when you eat real food, you feel real good.

freshthymeseatery.com

Name this Immune Elixir!

It kills nasty bacteria, and helps fight viruses. Inflammation in the human body, which research increasingly cites for a host of diseases and conditions, gets hobbled by it. A miracle drug? Well, it certainly is not a pharmaceutical — the health-boosting elixir is not hatched by white-jacketed chemists in suburban laboratories, sold in pharmacies and saddled with a litany of worrisome side - effects.

No, this is Fire Cider, and starting this week, we are selling our Fire Cider crafted in house, here at Fresh Thymes.

This gorgeous tonic, which has served as a potent folk medicine for generations, is a fermented beverage involving raw apple cider vinegar, turmeric, horseradish, garlic, onion, ginger, hot chilies, fresh citrus, and a dash of raw honey to lightly sweeten the pot. We embraced it some months ago, and decided upon tasting to experiment with our own creation. Our inaugural batch has been fermenting for a few weeks, and now it is ready to pour!

We are all about seasonal improvisation, and so will toy with our recipe throughout the year, adding different health promoting (of course!) vegetables and roots to each batch as they are harvested. If you swing by Fresh Thymes for the next week or so, in addition to the base (the list of ingredients that normally are used to make fire cider) the tonic will also include green onion and cilantro, in honor of the lightness and green-ness of spring. Sometimes we may remove the hot chilies, to make a nightshade-free batch. Other times, we will add adaptogenic herbs, like astragalus and ashwaganda to modulate our immune system, or supplement the fermentation with beets or kohlrabi. It all depends on what is in season, and our inspirations for new recipes.

We celebrate Fire Cider for its anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties. This is strong stuff! We also trumpet its ability to aid with digestion. Flavor? We dig it, but fire cider is not something to sip and savor, like a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir or a pint of Omission IPA. The horseradish can give it a nose-scorching, wasabi-like kick, and the base of raw ingredients are weighted heavily towards the fiery — thus, the elixir’s name. We serve Fire Cider by the shot glass, and find it is both a wonderful apertif (something sipped before a meal, to help nurture appetite) and a digestif (a post-prandial treat that promotes digestion).

Never tried fire cider? Crazy for the stuff? It can be bought in bottles, here and there, but try our home-crafted version. We fuss over our big mason jars packed with fermenting goodness, tweaking recipes and toiling to hike the batches with as much health-amplification as possible. We down at least a shot of fire cider a day, and we have a feeling it might become part of your routine, too.

Food Revolution Day and the Growe Foundation

Kids, gardens and food are close to Christine’s heart. She was an early supporter of Boulder’s fantastic Growe Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes health, nutrition and education in elementary schools through the magic of gardens. Among other things, for a number of years Christine was the Growe Foundation’s roving chef, teaching cooking classes across Boulder County that incorporated produce the kids had grown themselves.

The classes weren’t just about radishes and tacos. When she taught kids how to make Indonesian lettuce wraps, for example, the kids learned about Indonesia, as well as Asian fish sauce and Thai basil.

The approach works. Get the kids in the gardens, where it begins with soil and seeds. Teach them how to nurture the plants. By the time they snip that head of lettuce or pluck the pea pod, their relationship to food has already been transformed. Cooking, which is a vital (and sadly, fading) skill, resonates much more with the kids when they watched that basil plant sprout from miniature seed to aromatic bouquet. When all of this is tied back to curriculum, like how Indonesia is an archipelago of thousands of islands, is the fourth most-populous country in the world, and has been a vital link in international trade since the 7th century, it becomes more personal.

Christine cherished this work, and now, as the Boulder County Ambassador for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day— which is today — Fresh Thymes is thrilled to donate 5 percent of the restaurant’s proceeds to the Growe Foundation.

We are eager to help the great Jamie Oliver spread his gospel celebrating food education and family cooking, and to join him in the fight against obesity. Throughout the year, we intend to help spread Jamie’s message throughout Boulder County in different ways.

For starters, kids in schools across Boulder County grow vegetables in hoop houses sponsored by the Growe Foundation, and we are buying all of the lettuce — so far, that is 80 pounds of it — from four of the schools and serving it in different Fresh Thymes dishes, including a Growe Foundation salad, dressed with a recipe that the school kids created. All of the money we spend on the lettuce goes straight back to the garden-to-table programs in the schools.

Happy Food Revolution Day, comrades! Gardeners and cooks of the world unite!

Why Sea Vegetable?

We love our vegetables, here at Fresh Thymes Eatery. We dig grating the brussels sprouts for our slaw. We geek-out over the pleasures of fermentation — we nearly dance when it’s time to make kimchi again. The aroma of just-made pesto makes us swoon.

But it’s not just earth-rooted treasures that thrill us. We adore sea vegetables, too. Kelp noodles, in fact, have recently become regulars on the menu, in our pho-in-a-jar dish, which you can find in the refrigerated case, and in our increasingly popular pad thai.

 Why sea vegetables?

The kaleidoscope of water-borne vegetables — including both marine salt water and those from freshwater lakes — offer quite a bit, including different flavor profiles. Vegetarians who desire the atmospheric and evocative flavors of seafood, for example, embrace seaweeds, which can impart the flavor of fish without involving the harvesting of a single anchovy. The textures delight as well. Kelp noodles can simultaneously deliver slight crunch, like al dente wheat noodles, with an almost satiny mouthfeel. And classic sea vegetables like hijiki, arame and wakame introduce something gorgeously ethereal to soups, and something delightfully chewy to salads.

The flavors and textures are special, but it is in the realm of nutrition where sea vegetables really shine.

Sea vegetables, which need sunlight to grow and survive, are neither plants nor animals — they are algae, and are commonly grown on coral reefs or rock landscapes. They contain virtually every mineral (about 100 minerals and trace elements) found in the sea, the same minerals found in our blood. Sea vegetables contain between 20 and 50 times the amount of minerals found in land plants.

It’s not just the things with roots that get overshadowed by sea vegetables’ mineral content. Sea lettuce contains 25 times the iron of beef, while the iron content in wakame and kelp quadruples that found in beef. Milk gets touted for its calcium content, but hijiki, arame and wakame, those sea vegetables commonly found in Japanese seaweed salads, contain 10 times more calcium than the liquid we pump out of cows.

Sea vegetables are high in iodine, and thus help boost thyroid hormones, and come packed with vitamin K and iron, both of which are vital for blood. Bones get a boost from folate and calcium.

More? Indeed.

Sea vegetables possess an abundance of lignans, which are phytonutrients that inhibit blood cell growth that are responsible for nourishing cancer cells and for sending cancer cells into the bloodstream. They contain mucilagenous gels, such as algin, carrageenan and agar, which specifically rejuvenate the lungs and the gastrointestinal tract. The mucilagenous quality to sea vegetables helps with digestion, too; digestive tissues, essentially, turn more slippery, and food moves with greater ease through the digestive system.

Earth plants, of course, contain powerful punches of chlorophyll, a potent alkaline substance that is considered “the blood of plants.” Consuming chlorophyll is extremely healthy. Guess what? The highest concentrations of chlorophyll are found in sea vegetables.

Shall we continue? Yes!

The minerals in sea vegetables are in colloid form, meaning that all minerals and elements are fully integrated into the living plant tissue. Among other things, this means the minerals get used by the body, rather than just eliminated as waste.

Due to this overall high concentration of minerals, sea vegetables are extremely dynamic anti-oxidants, and the wallop of nutrients makes sea vegetables vigorous energy boosters.

Finally, sea vegetables are classic detoxifiers.

All of this is foundational for human life. We all begin our development in a saline solution in the womb and are nourished and cleansed by blood that has the same mineral composition as sea water.

They are gifts to humanity. Miracles. And we honor them with great love at Fresh Thymes.

Celebrate Earth Day!

Among the many things to embrace about Earth Day, here is a good one — it is international. What began in the United States in 1970 as a plea among worried people to treat the world with more care has blossomed into a movement in 192 countries, making it the largest secular holiday in the world. More than a billion people celebrate the planet’s special day.

That includes all of us here at Fresh Thymes Eatery World Headquarters, of course. In fact, we try hard to mark Eath Day every day, through how we run our restaurant.

It is not always simple. From Boulder to Buenos Aires to Bangkok, the restaurant business is notoriously wasteful. At most restaurants, an awful lot of what ends up on a plate is packaged up and shipped from far away. Scraps — so very many scraps — get tossed, destined for landfills. Recycling does not happen. The celery in the soup sprouted from a poison-drenched field, and the bacon in the burger came from a pig pumped with antibiotics and other drugs, and confined in appallingly tight quarters.

None of this is exactly earth-friendly.

How do we run a restaurant while toiling to honor Mother Earth?

There are the scraps — or the lack thereof. We use every part of every vegetable. What doesn’t become part of a salad, or a slaw, or a burger garnish gets used to make vegetable stock. Carrot ends become ingredients in pot pies. Bones? They are treasure! We break-down whole chickens, and reserve the backs for bone broth. You won’t find us tossing bones into trash cans. Anything that just can’t become part of a dish is turned into compost. Scraps at Fresh Thymes? Not so much.

We recycle everything that can be recycled, and only use napkins and take-out containers, among other things, that can be recycled. We even recycle our customer's drinking water, using 5 gallon buckets. When they are full, we water the plants around our Steelyards neighborhood. On average, we are recycling 8 gallons of water a day!

We look beyond our neighborhood, too. We think pesticide-driven agriculture is unfortunate, and in addition to broadcasting far too many poisons into soil and water, contributes to waste. So we strive for organic produce — most of what we sell is organic. And we shrink from the sprawl of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) across America, animal-raising businesses that harm animals by holding them in extremely close, and unsanitary, conditions, as well as using antibiotics and other drugs to sustain them through the inhumane conditions. We are picky about our meat. All of it comes from small farms in Colorado.

In addition, precious little that we cook and serve is shipped from beyond the state borders. Yes, our lemons and our olive oil, our caraway and black pepper and mangoes grow in places far from Colorado. But most of what you eat — the lamb, lettuce, chile pepper, peach and so on — comes from our breathtaking state.

We are always hunting for ways to lighten our footprint upon this glorious, miraculous planet. If you have ideas to help us along, please speak up! Your comments are gifts.

Happy Earth Day!

For the love of Honey

We fully embrace both health and taste at Fresh Thymes, and so we view honey as the ideal sweetener. It provides complex flavors rooted in different places and seasons, while simultaneously delivering a host of health benefits. The gift from precious bees is enormous — honey is anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal. Over time, it helps our bodies wrestle with seasonal allergies. It does not spoil, due in part to the scarcity of water in its make-up — the bees flap their wings to dry the nectar (thank you, bees!) — as well as its high level of acidity.

And humans have been eating it for a long time — stains found in 5,500-year-old jars in the Republic of Georgia are from honey.

Our affection for honey hinges on more than flavor and human health, though. As the world’s principal pollinators, honey bees give us our almonds and our onions, our grapes and peaches and raspberries, our cardamom, squash, cucumber, fennel, coffee, buckwheat, coconut and chili pepper. The list goes on and on. It is possible for humans to pollinate plants, but entirely impractical and exceedingly expensive. Without the bees, much of what we take for granted today for our meals would simply vanish.

And with colony collapse — that is, bee colonies dying en masse — occurring with disturbing frequency during the past decade, we need to work hard to make sure our bees are thriving. One solution, according to recent scientific reports, might rest with how we take care of our gardens and farms. A group of pesticides called neonicotinoids might be one factor contributing to colony collapse. Since the findings were published last year, more and more nurseries have committed to raising plants without neonicotinoids. Let's hope the trend continues through our vast agricultural system.

How much do we adore honey at Fresh Thymes? Six-gallons-a-week worth of passion, that’s how much. We use it in all of our desserts, and honey provides balance in many of our savory preparations, too. The only other sweetener we use, sparingly, is coconut sugar.

Andre on the farm

We have such a crush on bees that we are throwing a big party for the little guys, on Saturday, April 25. Come to Fresh Thymes all day for honey-happy events. Andre, a bee enthusiast from Jacob Springs Farm, will be on hand from 12-2pm to talk about home beekeeping, local bee-related projects and a global project with which he is involved. He will bring along an Open Source Beehive hive, and we will discuss Fresh Thymes' involvement with Open Source Beehive, an innovative Colorado nonprofit that helps spread beehives the way the bees themselves distribute pollen — with much hard work and success!

Tim from Highland Honey!

In addition, Tim from Highland Honey and Mead Master Mark from Medovina will swing by Fresh Thymes between 3 and 4 to sample honey and mead, which is honey wine (and which is spectacular).

Never been inside of a hive? Come to Fresh Thymes on April 25 and live the dream — between the home bee-keeping enthusiasts, the professionals and the lovers of all-things-honey, it’s going to be awfully buzzy!

Stay tuned for our full line-up of honey loving professionals!

Vegan Wine?

Have you heard of Vegan Wine?  I hadn't and when I did I was immediately interested!  Wasn't all wine "vegan" - it's just grapes right?


Well, not entirely.
Most all wines will get clarified, and or filtered or “fined” before bottling.  It is this fining agent that very strict vegans take exception with.  Most commonly used fining agents are casein (milk protein), albumin (egg protein), gelatin (from sad bones), isinglass (fish bladders)… So as those items are not technically “added” to the wine, it isn’t considered an ingredient and for the most part it isn't labeled. It’s easy to see how a strict vegan would take exception to this.

For us at Fresh Thymes, it's important for another population of people to know about this process common to most wines and that is our allergen/ingredient sensitive customer. As these conventional fining agents also happen to be among the most common allergens, we think it's important to know not just where our food comes from but also how it is produced.  As our body recognizes every ingredient on a molecular level, it makes sense that molecules of these agents could be left behind after the fining and clarification process. I say that as a highly ingredient sensitive eater (and lover of wine) myself!

The good news is many organic or biodynamic wineries do not use animal products to fine, they use charcoal, clay and other plant based substances. There are many excellent wines out there that also happen to be vegan, more wineries are starting to disclose fining agents and there are emerging websites dedicated to sourcing "vegan wine".  

At Fresh Thymes, we are so excited to be carrying an awesome vegan Cabernet and Chardonnay from The Vegan Vine !

Come in for a taste! 

Have you caught Broth Fever?

We have fielded numerous requests to start a blog and finally succumbed! Enjoy reading our first post!

Broth done right - the old school way.  At Fresh Thymes we don’t cut any corners to bring a proper broth to our customers. But what does old school mean exactly?  

There has been plenty of good press about broth as beverage and it’s health benefits.

If you have gotten the broth fever, here are a few of my old school secrets to making a proper broth yourself…

1. Have a very big soup pot or stock pot - if you take the time to make broth, you should make plenty.
2. Have good bones! - organic, pastured, grass finished are all indications you have good bones.  Seek them from your favorite farm store or stand. Also make sure to have a good ratio of gelatinous bones (wings, backs, trotter, necks, knuckles) to boney bones  (marrow, femur, should blade)
3. Roast!  Roasting the bones help deepen and enrich the flavor of the broth - no need to be fussy - dump the bones on a sheet pan, spread out and pop in a hot oven until golden brown.
4. Cold filtered water!  Yes, once you roast and place all the bones in your pot, fill with cold water.  Low and slow is the way to start coaxing the minerals from the bone.  More impurities and scum will rise to the surface if you start your bones in cold water.
5. Acid! Fancy chef’s will use wine in their broth, but what’s really needed is just acid.  Raw apple cider vinegar is best for nourishment.  The role of an acidic medium is to help pull the minerals from the bones, the whole reason you are making broth! To say nothing of the fact that raw apple cider vinegar is actually alkalinizing to your body. Just a big glug of high quality raw apple cider vinegar - and no, your broth won’t taste like vinegar.
6. Skim!  Once the broth has come to a boil, skim the surface scum and reduce the heat to the barest of simmer. If you don’t skim, all the brown and white foam will be in your broth! You don’t want that.
7. Don’t Boil, Don’t Stir - Broth doesn’t like that - it leads to a breakdown of collagen and impurities get reabsorbed by the broth leading to off flavors.
8. Don’t be afraid to leave your stove on!  Find a back burner on your stove and park that broth there for up to 3 or 4 days depending on the broth - remember you have that pot on the barest of simmers, it will be fine.
9. Don’t cover!  The flavor intensifies when the top is off and the water evaporates.  You can add more cold water if it gets too low (you want the bones below the broth instead of above).
10. Resist the urge to throw out the fat!  Drain the broth and pour into mason jars. A little fat cap on the broth helps extend it’s life by creating a seal.

From here, the broth is your blank canvas for awesomeness!  If you wish to create an even more nourishing and healing beverage, you can also add kombu (more minerals, soothing, emollient) burdock root (detoxifying) potatoes (potassium) asian mushroom (immune building) and cruciferous vegetable (cancer fighting)

Any animal bones are fair game for a good broth! Have you started to make broth?  

Good luck and tell me how it goes!