Lamb Chili
Lamb Chili
Our usual proteins tend to revolve around mostly chicken and fish, occasionally beef and every blue moon, some pork.
Fortunately our Food Lion is good about supplying lamb, in chops, ground or in shanks. It’s a nice way to mix things up a bit.
Here’s three of my lamb favorites:
Gyros: https://goodpointofview.com/2023/05/12/dons-gyro/
Lamb Stew https://goodpointofview.com/2024/11/17/lamb-stew/
Lamb Chops: https://goodpointofview.com/2023/07/19/greek-lamb-chops-with-lemon-rice-and-cucumbers/
In the Spring, I’ll do a Lamb Robert!
For Wednesday night we did something new, Lamb Chili. This is a small batch, two dinners and a lunch.
In a pot, caramelize one diced sweet onion.
Add 4 cloves of minced garlic, stir for 30 seconds
Add pepper flakes. I use Flat Iron 4 pepper. To taste.
Add a couple diced lamb shoulder shanks, trimmed to remove the fat and bones, brown all sides
Season with black pepper
Add two 14 oz cans of fire roasted diced tomatoes
Add one 14 oz can of low sodium black beans
Add about 1 tsp of cumin powder (to taste, I use half this)
Add 3 TBSP chili powder
Bring to a boil, then simmer for at least an hour.
This is my short-cut small batch recipe (use any protein you want, grilled chicken, hamburger, ground turkey…it will taste pretty much the same. So instead of grinding my own chilis to make the chili powder, I used spice rack stuff. Instead of crushing my garlic, I used jarred minced. Instead of using fresh tomatoes, I used canned. And I didn’t include any other heating elements than my 4 pepper mix, and it was plenty hot. Normally I’d dice in some jalapenos and add some yellow bell peppers. And I usually add chipolte peppers. I also usually make a jasmine rice for my chili, but this time we wanted the beans to do our starch work for us.
But this was incredibly easy, used ingredients we had (I bought the lamb for the snow storm)
Top with yogurt for a nice cooling ingredient you can mix in as you eat.
This is the first time I used lamb in chili, and wondered if it would be too ”gamey”, but it was incredible subtle. Absolutely a home run meal.