Slow cooked for hours, this dish will fill your kitchen with smells that’ll cwtch you and tastes that’ll comfort you. Serve them with mashed potatoes and gently steamed green veg or a pillow-like pile of fluffy basmati rice, then relish in the soft meat tumbling from the bone, slurp up the sauce and feel sated and satisfied for a long time afterwards…
Serves 4
Ingredients:
- 4 lamb shanks
- Olive oil (2-3 tablespoons)
- 4 onions
- 6 cloves of garlic
- 200ml red wine
- 4 dried bay leaves
- 400g tin of tomatoes
- 4/5 medium carrots, peeled and chopped in to large chunks
- 2 sticks of celery, washed and chopped in to chunks
- 1 heaped teaspoon sea salt and a good grind of black pepper
How to:
- Use a heavy cooking pot with a lid. Pour in the olive oil and turn the heat up so that you can brown the lamb shanks. It may be worth doing this two at a time; you need them to colour a little all over and too many in the pot will make them stew not fry. Remove them from the pan to rest on a plate.
- Add thinly-sliced onions to the pot and cook on a low heat for about 10 minutes until the onions are soft and slightly brown and caramel like. Crush in the garlic after about five minutes.
- Pour in the red wine and use it to deglaze any stuck meat from the bottom of the pot. Add the tomatoes and then fill the empty tin about 2/3 full of cold water. Add that along with the bay leaves, chopped carrots, chopped celery, salt and black pepper.
- Add the lamb shanks and move them around so that all of the meat is really coated.
- Bring to the boil for a moment and then cover and turn the heat right down to a simmer. Let it bubble away super gently for two and a half hours, stirring occasionally, turning the meat.
- You can either serve straightaway or you can cool and reheat very gently the next day. This will give the flavours time to make really good friends with one another and deepen. Make sure it is piping hot before you serve.
ALISON POWELL