Some celery out of the garden.
Here for once is a meat dish: stewed lamb with vegetables.
Best is to take meat from the leg or joint. These are not the most expensive parts and by the relatively long stewing they become nice and tender yet stay juicy!
Also, this dish is budget friendly and if you have a kitchen garden with herbs and some vegetables it becomes even more affordable.
The ingredients.
Let’s get down to the preparation though. For the taste I wanted to focus on freshness and two main notes: garlic and rosemary (I used them both fresh but you can of course use them dried. In this case you want to reduce the amount of garlic as fresh garlic is less intense than dried one).
Both garlic and rosemary mingle nicely with lamb and potatoes. As other vegetable I used celery but you can take any other vegetable of the season or that you particularly like, always nice are carrots.
First I want to give the lamb pieces and the potato wedges a little bit of color, so I roast them for about 5 minutes in a frying pan with a little bit of vegetable and extra virgin olive oil (we have a higher temperature here and because of that you don’t only want olive oil as it does not stand high temperatures). At the end of this frying process you can add the garlic already but be careful that it does not get brown and therefore bitter. Season with salt and black pepper.
Fresh out of the oven.
Next step is to arrange the lamb, potatoes, celery, garlic and rosemary in a casserole. Add a good sip of extra virgin olive oil, a little water or broth so that nothing sticks to the casserole and everything into the oven at a relatively low temperature of 160°-180° for about 45 minutes or a little longer depending on how much meat you have and how thick your pieces are.
Optional: you could add a tomato (fresh or canned) to obtain another fruity note to the sauce.
When the lamb comes out of the oven it should be so tender that you almost did not have to cut it with a knife.
On the plate.
All in all, a budget friendly dish and easy dish. You can feed a lot of people with and it’s also good for the cook as you do not have to take care of it a lot as soon as it’s in the oven.
Enjoy cooking and bon appétit!
