Lamb stew with mint and gnocchi in a pot
Getting together with friends for us always includes food and drinks. In our case, the drinks usually means wine. And the food that we thought was ideal for gatherings was barbeque.
However, once we went to one of those gatherings at our cousins’ house, and they served us bean stew.
components
- 1kg of 3rd category lamb
- 2 big onions
- 3 garlic cloves
- 1kg of fresh gnocchi
- 500 gr of fresh tomato
- 2l of beef broth + water when necessary
- 1 spoon of mustard (or teaspoon of powdered mustard)
- 1 bunch of mint (a lot)
- 1/2 teaspoons of cardamom
- 1 cup of whole fat yogurt
- 1 handful of parsley
- 450 gr of frozen peas
- 1 spoon of flour
- 1-2 spoons of olive oil
- salt, pepper to your taste
- 1/3 cup of lamb gravy (or to your taste)
Instruction
- First you need to remove the lamb fat and cut the meat into cubes for the stew.
- Chop onion and garlic finely. You will add flavour to the stew if you mix red onions, onions and garlic.
- Blanch the tomato, and peel the skin off, and then cut it into cubes.
- Fry the onion and garlic on olive oil. Add the lamb which you need to sprinkle on top with a bit of flour. Stew everything together for about 5 minutes more.
- Add tomato, cardamom, mustard and stew for about 5-10 minutes more.
- Pour with beef broth so that the meat is entirely covered in liquid and add water from time to time as it evaporates (but not too much).
- Leave it to simmer for 2 hours on light fire.
- After cooking for 2 hours, add gravy, yogurt and check how seasoned it is. Add salt and pepper if necessary. Leave it to simmer for another 30 minutes, and then add peas. Cook for another 15 minutes, and then add gnocchi.
- Cook everything together for 15 minutes more, then put parsley and mint once the pot is off the fire.
- If you have too much liquid, that is, the stew is not as thick as in the picture you can always add flour or starch to make it thicker.
- We ate it with grated fresh cabbage 🙂
I must admit that it’s definitely an easier option for the host because you can just leave the beans in the pot to cook for about 3-4 hours, while you can talk and laugh with your friends. In other words, you can sit and relax.
When you make barbeque, it’s different because you need to spend most of the time next to the smoke and fire. You grill a bunch of meat and get tired. After eating, the only thing you can do is go to sleep and forget about your friends 🙂
Let’s be clear, this doesn’t mean we completely ditch barbeque. But, there are other ways to spend time with your friends with good food and drinks.
I had set up the pot before friends even arrived, and it was cooking the whole time we were chatting 🙂
Where do I get lamb?
Unfortunately, getting lamb in my city is not the easiest thing in the world, unless you don’t mind going to get lamb from one part of the town to another.
To be honest, I am too lazy to do that.
I prefer everything to just come to me.
That’s just how I am, what can I do 🙂
Surfing through Instagram, I came across Gazdinstvo trešnjica sa Zlatibora, which brings lamb to your doorstep.
It was ideal for me. The only problem was that you need to get half the lamb, which is 8-10 kg.
I was shocked, what was I supposed to do with so much lamb? And on top of that, I didn’t know whether it was good or bad.
We are not so much into lamb, so for us it meant that if it didn’t smell it was good, if it smelled bad it wasn’t.
But, you know, there’s no gain without pain.
Fortunately, I took the risk and ordered it.
Once the meat arrived, it didn’t look that much anymore, even though it was 9kg with bones.
Then, I removed the bones from the parts where I didn’t need them. I separated the meat in categories and left it aside for the stew, while removing fat entirelly or partially.
I don’t have to mention that once I put these 9kg of lamb into the freezer, it seemed to me that not even a chicken can fit there anymore.
So, I encourage you to order the lamb, and separate it into categories.
I picked the worst parts for the next day’s stew.
Lamb stew
This is a recipe for lamb stew a bit different that what you might be used to. Besides onions, I used tomatoes, beef broth, peas, mustard, cardamom, yogurt, mint and lamb gravy.
I made the lamb gravy (a thinner version) from bones and of course, a bit of the 3rd category meat. Recipe for every gravy is here.
You can make gravy simultaneously with lamb or the day before. Esentially, you put it during the last hour to add to the taste. If you don’t have lamb gravy, you can use any other 🙂
Or you can go without it.
This was just an idea on how not to throw away any piece of lamb.
The tomato in this recipe can be fresh, but the skin needs to be peeled off. You can also use homemade or store bought ketchup, but you need to adjust the quantity. Or you can even use tomato juice, but also adjust it to the amount of broth and prolong the cooking time for the liquid reduction.
If you don’t have beef broth, you can always use beef soup cube as a substitute.
You can season the stew as much as you like.
All in all, if you are going to make some changes in the amount of liquid, the point is to have the lamb entirely covered in liquid while cooking. So, having that in mind, adjust the amount of liquid. At the end, the stew should be thick, not thin. Pay attention to the reduction.
The rest of the recipe and step by step procedure on how to make lamb stew in a pot is as follows.
