I often put chilies in the freezer as it seems to make them fairly mild and then I don’t bother to de-seed them and they’re never too hot. They’re also very easy to slice when frozen.
Ingredients
- good glug olive oil
- 750 g shoulder of lamb (cubed into big bite sized chunks)
- salt & pepper
- 1 large onion (peeled and chopped)
- 4 cloves garlic (peeled and sliced)
- 2 green chilies
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 2 x 400 g tin tomatoes
- 1 x 300 ml bottle lager
- 1 tblsp tomato puree
- 1 tblsp soft brown sugar
- 3 tsp dried oregano
- 2 tins black beans
- big bunch coriander
Method
- Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan and fry the lamb over a high heat so that it browns all over.
- Season really well, keep the heat up high and when you have a good colour, remove from the heat, spoon the lamb onto a plate and don’t wash out the pan.
- Fry the onions in the same pan until soft and season well.
- Add the garlic, chilies and cumin. Then add the lamb back to the pan and mix well so that everything gets really well coated in all the tasty stuff.
- When it starts to smell good, add in the tomatoes, beer, puree, sugar and oregano. Bring up to a simmer, put a lid on and then put this on a very gentle heat and cook for 90 minutes.
- At that stage, add the beans and cook for another 30 minutes. I did the first part with a lid on and gave it a gentle stir every now and then and left the lid off for the second tranche of cooking, so that it could reduce down.
- Let it cool down a bit to relax and then taste. Like all stews, this tastes better if you can leave it to settle down for an hour or so (or overnight) and re-heat. Overnight snoozing and next day reheating works well when you want flavours to develop.
- Serve with rice or even on its own as the black beans stretch it out.
