Gluten Free Options at Burger Night? Yes please!

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posted on

March 28, 2021

Hey Everyone, Kasey Here!

I have some GREAT news for anyone out there like myself who has Celiac Disease, is gluten intolerant or has a gluten sensitivity etc; you can eat virtually everything at Burger Night!!!! Gluten free burgers, buns, fries, cheese curds AND beer all available at Burger Night!

I'll repeat that for you: Gluten Free Options at Burger Night!

I'm going to come back to the cheese curds and other gluten free goodies at Burger Night, I promise! But first I want to give you a little background into this gluten-free world some of us unlucky humans (and some animals!) are forced to live in because the fact that Together Farms is offering these items is a very big deal. I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease in November, 2016 at the bright age of 21. Celiac Disease is a "serious autoimmune disorder that can occur in genetically predisposed people where the ingestion of gluten leads to damage in the small intestine." - Celiac.org.

How I finally got diagnosed...

I've had stomach problems my entire life and because every doctor I had told me I was the picture of health and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me I chalked these problems up to a sensitive/nervous stomach. Eventually I thought I was crazy because any test the doctor would (reluctantly) run would come back with "perfectly healthy" results.. So I gave up for a long time and just decided my symptoms were "normal." This worked until my symptoms (severe nausea, lightheadedness and dizziness 24/7 along with spending 5+ hours in the bathroom each day) became too much right around my 21st birthday. So I sternly asked my new doctor [who told me I might have Irritable Bowel Syndrome but that my symptoms were at every point of that spectrum so probably not], to refer me to a Gastroenterologist. (Okay, fine my Dad made me ask because my symptoms were WAY out of hand, but also by sternly I mean very nicely and timidly)*Note that I'm VERY terrified of needles, blood and pretty much hospitals in general so even asking to see a new doctor who was definitely going to run blood work on me was a very big step*Once my gastroenterologist took a LOT of blood and ran some tests, EVERY test came back "perfectly healthy" except for one test where my levels were elevated just slightly, but enough where they wanted me to have an Upper Endoscopy because they suspected I might have a problem with gluten. When the results came in from my Upper Endoscopy my doctor called me and said that I did indeed have Celiac Disease... this was the FIRST time a doctor gave me a legitimate name/reason for why I had been feeling the way I had for my entire life. I basically cheered on the phone and she was a little shocked because, in her words "normally happiness is not what I hear when I give patients this diagnosis... I'm actually not really sure how to react here." This doctor was giving me a diagnosis of an autoimmune disease that is very serious and I basically hugged her via the phone. Even when I went to the follow up appointment with my parents where my doctor was expecting tears while she told us all of the serious issues I could develop at any time (lord help me if I ever develop diabetes 1 and have to give myself insulin shots), but I wasn't sad at all, just curious and so happy she wasn't telling me "you're totally healthy and all of your tests came back perfect." She had an actual diagnosis AND a plan to get my body back on track to being healthy again!!!! It's still shocking to me that it takes an average of 6-10 years for someone to be diagnosed with Celiac Disease even though it took me 21 years to be diagnosed.. But to be fair there are over 300 symptoms of celiac disease and each person experiences those symptoms differently so doctors are trying their best.

Where/What Can I Eat?!

Now that I had the diagnosis and met with a nutritionist (and other doctors to make sure everything that can go wrong with an autoimmune disease wasn't going wrong with me) I had to start making serious changes to my diet! Now that I'm over 2 years out from my diagnosis, I pretty much have this whole no gluten thing down! Trying to eat out with a gluten sensitivity is basically impossible, seriously here are the steps you have to go through. Not only do you have to do background research on the restaurant but it actually seriously hard to find gluten free options at restaurants and it takes a pretty bold person to ask restaurant staff to make special accommodations for you if they don't have any gluten free options already available. This is not my strong suit because I also have a fear of being the center of attention even in small groups (unless I'm telling a story or purposely put myself in the center of attention). But hey, if you are comfortable with only ordering a salad with no croutons & know the ingredients of the salad dressing options (because watch out, there's even gluten in those!), are a bold person who isn't afraid of making the wait staff's job just a teensy bit harder or you just never go out to eat then you're totally fine! Geez Kasey, aren't you being a little dramatic?

NO, I am not being dramatic in the least! Remember how I was 21 when I was diagnosed, so I know exactly what I'm missing out on now that I can't even have a trace of gluten in my diet? I don't know how many of you reading this have a gluten sensitivity/allergy but if you do then I highly doubt you've had a deep fried cheese curd since you were diagnosed. I'm from Wisconsin, and I am a full on cheese head (even though I grew up right across the border in Minnesota) so I seriously almost started happy crying when Stephanie told me about the gluten free cheese curds via text yesterday.If you still think I'm being dramatic then imagine cutting out all products that contain wheat, barley or rye from your diet (and many other grains depending on your sensitivity because sometimes your body reacts to those negatively too) for the rest of your life. This means no bread, beer, pizza, pasta, Pringles, malt drinks, cheese curds, chicken nuggets, Chinese food, cereal (huge improvements in this area lately), chips, seasonings and more. (Seriously, when you get diagnosed you get a very large packet of information after meeting with a nutritionist who tells you everything you can't eat anymore and what will happen to your body if you don't cut those things out). Yes that list was mainly the things I miss most about gluten, but you get the idea. While gluten free alternatives to many of these products exist the few good ones are hard to find which is why it's so great that Together Farms is offering so many gluten free options!

Hooray, Burger Night to the Rescue! Tell me about the GF options!

Now do you understand why it's so amazing for Burger Night to have so many gluten free options!? Like I said above, I almost cried happy tears after Stephanie told me all of the gluten-free options that she is offering at Burger Night. The two gluten free beers are Copperhead (Copper Ale) and the Kickback (Kolsch) from the amazing gluten-free Alt Brewery in Madison, WI. The Copperhead Copper Ale is a Great American Beer Festival Silver Medal Winner! I didn't get too much time after turning 21 to know what kind of beer I like, but these are definitely beers I'm looking forward to trying. Plus we are the only ones to be serving Alt Brewery products on this side of Wisconsin, so it's kind of a big deal!At Burger Night we have a completely separate fryer for gluten free items in the works, and we are found the perfect gluten free bun from Green Bakery to top these amazing 100% grassfed and finished burgers (and other yummy things being announced soon). The fries are already gluten free and our Together Farms Chef will be making the breading for the cheese curds himself with gluten free ingredients! We use lard to fry everything in, which means we know exactly what is in our food and exactly what we fry that food in. If you're a member of the gluten free community, then you probably know how shocking it is for a small farm who happens to also serve burgers, fries and more on their land to have not only one gluten free option, but multiple!! Honestly when Stephanie said that along with the TF Chef she was planning the gluten free items I expected what restaurants usually offer up; a big piece of lettuce wrapped around the burger with some bland fries on the side. I've seen the start of the menu (stay tuned!), and with these gluten free options that Stephanie and the TF Chef created I can basically eat any one of the burgers I want!!!Are you as excited about these amazing gluten free options as I am?! Let us know in the comments if you've even heard of Celiac Disease/Gluten Intolerance etc before, or if you're in the GF community along with me! :) p.s. less than 2 weeks until Burger Night!!!

🍔 Burger Night Pop-Ups: The Fall Encore!

Couldn’t let perfect fall weather go to waste! We’re bringing Burger Night back for three bonus pop-ups full of burgers, bingo, music, and even helicopter rides over peak fall color.

Week 23 of 23: The LAST Burger Night week of 2025

Burger Night is open, rain or shineThursday & Friday 4pm-8pmSaturday noon-8pmSunday noon-7p And just like that (crazy fast, right?)… we’ve reached the end of another Burger Night season. Week 23 of 23. The grand finale. If you’d told me back in April that we’d be closing out in sundresses instead of flannels, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet here we are in October, setting heat records and still somehow pretending it’s summer. Wisconsin, you really do keep us on our toes at all times. The Burger of the Week: Chili Cheese Burger We’re sending the season out with a brand-new creation: the Chili Cheese Burger. 🔥 Here’s what you’ll get: A 100% grassfed beef patty (raised right here at Together Farms) A hearty beef + bacon chili piled on top A blend of melty cheeses Our smoky, seasoned sour cream Crunchy fried onions for the perfect little bite of texture All served (or should we say contained, barely) on a brioche bun Is it messy? Absolutely. Is it delicious? Double absolutely. Did I picture people eating chili when it’s 90 degrees out? Not so much. But when I wrote this menu back in January, “record-breaking October heat wave” wasn’t exactly on my bingo card. Don’t worry, once the sun dips behind the hill (about 7pm, so it really is October) the temps drop fast and you’ll be glad you got chili after all. Or just ignore the weather the best you can, which is what I try to do every single week with only moderate success. 🤪 (Note that we have about 15 other main meal options on the menu, not just whatever the BOTW special is; you can see the menus on the website.) What’s Happening This Weekend This final weekend is packed with fun: Thursday 6:30p: Family Feud Style Trivia – One of the easiest and most fun trivia formats to play. Free, family-friendly, and prizes up for grabs! Friday 5-8p: Zeke Fitz (JUST ADDED) – If you saw him earlier this summer, you know he had folks slow dancing in the rain. This time we’re giving him sunshine. Expect 90s country favorites, modern country, classic rock, and alternative. A little something for everyone. Saturday 5-8p: Jason Albert, The Northwoods Bassist – A one-man-band who plays bass, lead, rhythm, sings, and runs a drum track all at once. He covers everything from Hendrix and Styx to Al Green and Otis Redding. Unique, fun, and seriously talented. Sunday 3p: Bingo – Our jackpots are sitting at 6000 and 500 right now. Imagine how awesome it would be to close out the season by taking that home! Yes please!! 🎉 Beyond the Burger Of course, there’s more than food and music: Cows grazing in the fields – and yes, we still get asked if we have cattle. You’ll also spot monarchs, butterflies, and plenty of birds making the most of this warm spell. Campfire all weekend – nothing beats burgers + firelight (and it gets dark early now...man, do I hate that). Farm Store Sale – We’ve got DIY kits and books on sale to help you “fend for yourselves” until May. Every title has been handpicked, and the kits are perfect for a little winter project. Stay alive until May please! 🙏 Food & Bar – We’ve stocked heavy for this last run so the menu should stay strong all weekend, but if you decide to go wild, we might run out of a thing or two by Sunday. Bar is loaded, 12 beers on tap, and plenty of favorites. Kitchen is loaded, 15+ burgers, pork, sides and kids meals just waiting to get in your bellies!!! Bittersweet Ending Closing weekend always brings a mix of feelings. It’s sad to shut the gates after months of laughter, burgers, live music and community. But what a gift to end the season like this — with sunshine, warm nights and the farm full of life. We’re grateful for every single one of you who came out this year: whether it was your first time or your twentieth (we see you), whether you came for trivia, bingo, live music or "just" a burger and a beer. You each make Burger Night the one-of-a-kind venture that it is. So let’s make one more memory together, shall we? Hours: Thursday & Friday 4-8p, Saturday 12-8p, Sunday 12-7p 📍 W93 Norden Rd, Mondovi, WI See you at the finale. ❤️

“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers)

“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers) If you’ve ever sat on our farm with a burger in one hand and a beer in the other, gazing at the cows on the hill and wondered: “What made them decide to do this?" well, friend, settle in. The short answer is: we wanted to bring people to the farm and pizza was already taken. But the long answer? The long answer involves 60 acres of overgrown dreams, a barn on the brink of collapse, a freezer full of lard and the sort of miracles you only recognize in hindsight. It All Started With a (Totally Normal) Idea… Back in 2009, when we bought this place, we had no intention of selling meat, inviting strangers over or running a seasonal restaurant. Heck, we didn’t even have farming experience. The idea was simple: raise our kids in the country, grow some of our own food, and enjoy a little space. That’s it. We bought the property when Mady was three and Adeyle was six months old. If you had told me then that someday we’d be hosting live music, running a bar and serving 300+ burgers on a Saturday night… I’d have assumed you were drunk. And then I’d have laughed until I couldn’t breathe and pointed out that neither Andy nor I had ever farmed a day in our lives and we knew even less about running a restaurant. But life’s funny like that. The Dilapidated Farm This farm hadn’t been used for animals in ages. It was more of a rural junkyard with a leaky house, decaying buildings and enough broken stuff to fill a dozen dumpsters. It took us a full year just to clean things up and find our starting point. But then came the animals. We started with a couple pigs and cows for ourselves. Then came chickens. A few geese. Some ducks. A pair of goats that may or may not have been invited. A sheep. A milk cow. Turkeys. More pigs. (You get the idea.) And then we reasoned amongst ourselves: “Well, if we’re already feeding a couple pigs, what’s a couple more? We can sell the extras and get our own meat for free!” HAHAHAHAHAHA. That was cute. Because spoiler alert: there's no such thing as "free" meat when you have now created an entirely new division called SALES. (And, pro tip: marketing and sales is way harder than production. By a lot. Sigh, what young, naive fools we were.) But we had convinced ourselves it was a great idea (another pro-tip: always run your ideas past people smarter than you and with no skin in the game). So we expanded. More pigs. More cows. And just when we were starting to feel like maybe we were getting the hang of it, corn prices shot through the roof and feeder pigs became impossible to find. Which meant: time to make our own piglets. But you can’t just have one sow. The efficient number is closer to six. So… guess who’s now drowning in pork? You're a good guesser! It was us. The Farmer's Market Fizzle At this point we needed storage, so we added a walk-in freezer. Then we needed to sell all that meat, so we hit up every farmer’s market we could get into.Which was exhausting (remember, we both had day jobs during all of this too). And limited. And frustratingly political. (If you think farmer’s markets are all kumbaya and holding hands, think again.) This meant we couldn’t get into the big downtown market or winter market, so we did 3-5 small ones every week, and we couldn’t go to the nearby Twin Cities markets because our beloved butcher is only WI-inspected and using them is a non-negotiable (truly uncured meats (no celery either!) and no weird stuff is nearly impossible to find).We knew farmer’s markets weren’t going to be a long-term plan anyway. I had quite the knack for bringing the exact wrong products on any given day and hated how weather-dependent they were, not to mention seasonal (This was 10+ years ago before social media was the force it is today and before winter markets were much of an option around here.)So the wheels started turning…What if, instead of us chasing people down in hot parking lots, we could get people to come to us (and yes, this is also when we started the online store)? The Farm as a Destination? Our friends and family had started commenting on how beautiful the farm was. And once we looked up from our grindstones long enough, we saw it too. The view. The peace. The potential.Meanwhile, farm-to-table restaurants started popping up in Eau Claire and we started supplying a few. This gave us hope and contacts. But while other farms were doing pizza nights, I couldn’t make that fit for us.For one, I have a terrible relationship with dough and baking (just ask my mother). And two, we’re not a dairy, wheat, or veggie farm, we’re a meat farm. Pizza just didn’t check enough boxes for the ingredients we had and wanted to keep having.But burgers? Burgers are just as versatile as pizza, the focus is MEAT, specifically BEEF. And, BONUS: they go really well with fries and cheese curds.Which brings us to what I'll lovingly call my "lard problem". A Fat Problem (and a Deep-Fried Solution) We had rendered all this gorgeous lard from our pastured pigs and were using some in soaps and balms (shoutout to Good Fat Skincare, formerly Stephanie’s Super Swine Soap), but it was piling up. And while tallow is currently having quite the moment in the spotlight, lard is still a four-letter word to many people (but pro-tip: it's even better for you in lotions!).So I was venting to a chef friend about my lard conundrum when he casually mentioned, “You know, you could use it in the fryer.” EUREKA. That was it. The vision was born: Burgers and fries. Made with our beef. Fried in our fat. Done. Now we just had to figure out literally everything else. 😂 No Experience? No Problem! (Kinda.) We didn’t have restaurant experience or restaurant-investor money. So we did what we always do: figured it out one painful, hilarious, miracle-at-a-time step after another.We leaned on our restaurant friends to help us figure out menus, sourcing, kitchen layout, vent hoods, fryer safety, grease disposal....the million things you don't even know are a thing until you start planning and talking it through. We also knew we wanted everything made fresh to order, not precooked or being held. (Again, there’s a reason you don’t see many burger farms. It’s a trickier & more expensive setup than pizza....especially when you have no idea what you are doing.) So we did pop-ups to test this little theory of mine that if people would drive out to veggie farms for pizza, maybe they'll drive out to a meat farm for burgers??And lo and behold…during one of those pop-ups, who should show up but PBS’s Wisconsin Foodie, a show that had rarely (never?) come this far west and didn’t waste airtime on dumb ideas. They liked what they saw. The wind was now in our sails. Lightning Strikes (Literally) So we got to work. We worked with our health inspector to find the best way to use our existing farm spaces safely. Since banks are pretty well-known for not funding build-it-and-they-will come types of operations we had to get creative with funding and are grateful to have received a loan through our county’s Revolving Loan Fund (because we were creating jobs) and a USDA grant that helped with marketing and startup costs.But the real turning point? That WI Foodie episode that made us believe it really was a good idea and gave us a platform before we really even opened! How crazy is that?!? I'm not sure we would've been able to financially survive those first few years of start-up expenses without it. And the only reason I even saw the post from WI Foodie looking for new farms?I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook.I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook. Lightning. Literally. ⚡ Burgers, Fries, and Big Dreams So that’s how Burger Night started: A daunting pile of lard, a string of well-timed miracles and the belief that people might just come to the middle of nowhere for something delicious, meaty and fun.Today, Burger Night is burgers, fries, beer, music, bingo, trivia, community and the most magical little farm in the hills of Mondovi.Has everything gone according to plan? Absolutely not.We thought we’d be building a permanent restaurant building “in a few years”. That was many years ago. Reality (and weather) had other plans. And covid struck when we were just two years old so we had quite a baptism-by-fire for those first couple of years (if you came out during 2020-2021 you should give us another try, pretty sure more than a few wrote us off during those crazy years). But now we have our legs somewhat under us.I also loved the idea of turning the used fryer oil into biodiesel for the tractor to really complete the circle but that hasn't made it to reality yet. But there's a million other ideas cooking.The next BIG goal is to build a new building for farm operations so we can convert the barn into a bar with indoor seating. (We’re just waiting on a cool $200K to fall from the sky. Lightning, take the hint.) From Lard to Legacy So why burgers?Because they made sense for our farm, our products, our weird little challenges, our personalities and our beautiful patch of land. Because we wanted something fun & creative. Because fries and cheese curds. But ultimately, because we wanted to share the farm with you.And somehow it all just came together.