Nom Nom Nom - Lamb Stew.

We recently purchased a leg of lamb from Costco - it weighed about 4.5 pounds, but after I trimmed it, it really provided about 4 pounds of good meat, the trimmings were either small pieces of meat, tough sinew, or undesirable hunks of fat. I used our food processor and turned the small pieces of meat into ground lamb.

Anyway - so I wanted to cook something with lamb, and so here we go!

Ingredients:
You'll need the following basic ingredients (not including the spices):
• 3~4 lbs of lamb (bite sized)
• 1 large onion
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 3 inch of ginger
• 28 oz of crushed tomatoes
• 6 oz can of tomato paste
• 1 cup of water


Take out your food processor, puree the onion, garlic, and ginger; we shall refer to this as puree mixture (please ignore the presence of the ground lamb, I added it to the stew to get rid of the trimmings).


Grab three bowls. In each bowl, put the following spices.

Bowl 1:
• 2 Bay leaves
• 1 cinnamon stick

Bowl 2:
• 2 tsp cumin seeds
• 2 tsp fennel seeds

Bowl 3:
• 1 tsp tumeric
• 2 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 1 tsp salt




Cooking:
1. Apply medium heat to a large pot, add oil, and everything in Bowl 1 to the oil until the cinnamon stick uncurls.









2. Then add the puree mixture, and cook until the onions are translucent and the garlic no longer smells raw










3. Meanwhile, apply medium heat to a frying pan, add some oil, and then lightly fry the contents of Bowl 2, keep stirring until the cumin turns brown, then turn the heat off. Pour the oil into the puree mixture, and scrape the seeds into the pot.






4. Add the protein to the pot, pour the contents of Bowl 3 into the pot, and cook the meat until it turns darker.

5. Add the tomato puree and tomato paste. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Let the pot cook for another 35 minutes or so. After I tasted the sauce, I decided to add frozen corn and peas.




6. Serve on rice, or eat it with roti.

Nom Nom Nom!