Slow braised lamb in red wine

Straight from the freezer and you would never have guessed! We froze this lamb in red wine (and the mash). Both resurrected beautifully and we're giving it a 10 out of 10. If only ALL ready meals tasted like this. See our recipe below.
With food as expensive as it is these days, why not boil up the whole bag of spuds, mash and freeze in handy portions.
After an early evening stroll to the pub, we returned to this delicious meal. Everything was ready within 15 minutes - the fresh broccoli and cauliflower taking the longest time to cook.

If you would like to know more about how we achieved our fabulous weight loss see OUR IDEA.

Read more about our successful weight loss journey - Our Experiment

For the slow braised lamb recipe:

SLOW BRAISED LAMB IN RED WINE SAUCE

Ingredients

serves at least 4

1.5 kg lamb shoulder

350 ml (half bottle) of red wine (we used a heavy red - Shiraz)

4 chopped onions

4 cloves garlic

one each - carrot and celery stick finely chopped

large sprig of rosemary

large sprig of thyme

couple of bay leaves

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Brown the meat in a frying pan, then add this to the SLOW COOKER together with all the other ingredients. Top up with enough water/stock to cover the meat, and that's it. We slow cooked on HIGH for an hour, reduced it to LOW while we were out, then returned it back to the HIGH setting for the last couple of hours cooking.

After around 6 hours of slow cooking, we removed 132g of pure fat which was spooned off the top of the casserole.  

When the meat was cooked, we continued removing fat from the cooking liquid using our fat separator (or you could skim again). This time we removed a further 40g of fat. It's this unnecessary fat - all 172g of it (a whopping 1500 calories) that lurks unsuspectingly in many dishes, that we don't wish to eat when we cook for ourselves. 

SAUCE

The cooking liquid was boiled so that it was reduced by a third. We then blended until smooth, then adjusted the seasoning again. We added a small teaspoon of honey to ours, as it was slightly bitter, and thickened with a little cornflour. Then whisked in a small piece of butter just before serving to give it a nice sheen.

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