As the winter months are starting to set in, it is worthwhile having a couple of casserole recipes at your fingertips. Casseroles in my opinion are wonderful because you can leave them to cook away in the oven at a low temperature and know that after 2-3 hours you will have an amazingly tender meat and vegetable casserole ready to eat. The other major benefit to a casserole is that there is really no need to serve anything with them other than some French bread – this is because the casserole contains all the carbohydrates and vegetables to make it a well-rounded meal.
A casserole dish is an invaluable piece of kit to have in your kitchen; however if you don’t have one then you could always use a deep oven-proof dish that you cover with a double layer of tin foil. If you do this you will need to make sure that the tin foil is on very tight so that the steam stays inside the dish whilst it is cooking.
Lamb and Bean Casserole
Ingredients:
- shoulder of lamb
- 2 onions (diced)
- 1 red pepper (diced)
- 2 carrots (diced)
- 3 celery stalks (diced)
- a small bunch of thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tsp paprika
- tin of tomatoes (400g)
- 1 tbsp tomato puree
- ½pt vegetable stock
- a tin of Cannellini white beans (800g)
- 2 glasses of red wine
- seasoning
- oil (for cooking with)
Steps:
1. Preheat oven to 160C fan.
2. Place Lamb in a large casserole dish with a little oil and cook for 5 minutes allowing the meat to brown off a little.
3. Add the onions, carrots, celery, pepper, seasoning and paprika and mix well.
4. Finally add all the other ingredients, cook for 10 minutes to allow it to come up to heat before placing in the oven and cooking for 2 – 2½ hours until the meat is meltingly tender and falls off the bone.
5. Remove from the oven. Take the shoulder out of the casserole and strip off any meat that may still be attached to the bones. Cut the meat into bite sized chunks before returning the meat to the casserole dish; stir the well before serving with a slice of French bread.
Antonia Cooks 
This sounds fabulous, lamb has always been one of my favourite meats. I wish it was easier to find fresh where i live, unfortunatly the butchers will only sell you the whole animal, which as much as i’d love to, i wouldn’t even have the space to store it all! Nice recipe thank you for sharing
Hi there,
Thank you very much for your comment I hope you try the recipe. You mention that you wouldn’t be able to store a whole lamb in your freezer space. We rear lambs (till they are 5-6 months old) at home for their meat and we find that once they have been butchered it is quite surprising how little space they actually take up in the freezer. In fact this year we had to store one of the lambs in our smallest fridge/freezer that lives in our kitchen as the freezer chest was packed full of fruit etc from the summer months. However it will be difficult if you have a small freezer. Just a thought could you find a friend to share a whole lamb with?
Fields full of fresh lamb whenever you want.. now thats heaven!
We only have a small freezer at the top of the fridge so storiong even half a lamb may be diffcult, we have thought about sharing with friends, its just a little difficult to get people to commit. One day we will do it and make Barbacoa – its a traditional Mexican way to cook lamb in the ground wrapped in Nopales.. i love it!
I am not going to lie to you have just had to ‘Google’ Barbacoa and Nopales, having flicked through the images I am now salivating. I say go the whole hog (lamb in this instance) and do it! Please then blog about it! I reckon you would have a lot of very happy friends, neighbours and followers!
Hahaha.. yep i think so too! When it happens i will certainly blog it! Thanks for your enthusiasm, now i am going to be dreaming about lamb!