Ireland - Lamb Stew

Preparation: 35 mins

- with a toddler and a baby in a front pack: 50 mins 

Cook time: 6 hours

Serves: several hungry adults

Olivier's: ★★★★★

I ended up asking my brother about this one, being that he lives in Ireland with an Irish wife, and his response was "potatoes."  He also told me of the eternal stew that his wife's parents have, where they just add new stuff to it everyday.  I am uncertain as to whether he was exaggerating, but, it is an interesting way to not really have to cook, except for once, to "seed" it, right at the beginning.  I have to say that the stew I cooked did improve with age, and by the third day, it was truly delicious.

After comparing several recipes, the common ingredients tended to be lamb, onions, carrots and potatoes.   Some recipes called for garlic, which I didn't feel was very traditional; some had a weird gratin-style layering (including one of the recipes that I drew my stew from); and one had wine in it.  Both of the linked recipes called for beef stock, but I didn't bother with it. I just got a shoulder of lamb and popped the bone in the slow cooker with the other ingredients, so it could generate its own stock during the cooking process. 

Ingredients:

1 shoulder of lamb, bone in, cut into 2-3cm chunks

oil

250g bacon, diced (I used middle)

1 kg potatoes, peeled if you please, and quartered

3 onions, diced

2 large carrots, sliced

2 tbsp tomato paste

1 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped roughly

1/2 cup of flour

1 bay leaf

water

1/2 cup of chopped parsley

salt and pepper

Method:

1. Crank up your slow-cooker, put your lamb bone in the bottom

2. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on the lamb pieces, then brown them in small batches in a fry-pan.  Don't be tempted to overload the pan, or the pieces will boil instead of brown.

3. Put the pieces in the slow-cooker, then stir the flour through to coat the lamb

4. Add the bacon

5. Add the onions, carrots, potatoes, tomato paste, thyme and bay leaf

6. Give everything a good mix-around

7. Add enough water to come up to about 2cm below highest bit of ingredient in the pot.  The potatoes, onions and carrots are going to release a load of water so you don't need too much.  You can always top it up if it looks dry.

8. Cook for 6 hours on high. 

9. Stir in chopped parsley

10. Taste it to see if it needs salt before serving.  I find that adding salt when using bacon can make a dish too salty sometimes, so never put salt at the beginning.

Notes: 

-This can be served with dumplings, put into the slow-cooker half an hour before you serve it. Here is my dumpling recipe. It makes about 5 small-medium dumplings, but it is easily doubled if you have a hungry family, or someone who particularly likes dumplings.  

- A lot of recipes  like this called for the meat to be braised in the flour. I have never managed to get this right - it always, always catches and burns; or, the flour builds up in the pan and it burns and then you spend 17 hours trying to scrub it off. Anyway, Julia Child's recipe for boeuf bourguignon calls for the flour to be added after browning, and this has solved my problems many times over.

- This is a big recipe, and left-overs freeze well.

- Mine looked pink for a long while, from the tomato paste and flour.  It got to the nice orange colour, as seen in the photo, at the end.  

- Being lamb, this is a super fatty stew.  If you are a bit fat-conscious you could make this a day ahead, refrigerate and then skim the fat off the top the next day. 

Next stop: Ecuador