Also called “pope’s stew“. It’s often cooked on St. George’s day (6-th may) when a lot of male lambs are sacrificed after the end of the Easter’s fasting. It’s very tasty and filling stew. Anyway – If you don’t have or can’t afford fresh lamb meat, probably your local store should have non-frozen cutlets. It is very important to choose pink meat (look at the picture below). Pink means fresh. If it goes brown, then it’s not lamb or not fresh enough.

Lamb's shoulder meat

For 2 dishes you will need:

• 1 medium lamb shoulder
• 600 grams (1 pound) of small onions
• 3 cloves garlic
• 50 grams butter
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 table spoons sunflower oil
• 1 small ground tomato without skin
• 2-3 tea spoons of cumin
• 1 table spoon red pepper
• dozen leaves of spearmint
• salt to your taste.

Preparation

The onions are poured with boiling water and are left to cool naturally. They are much easier to peel that way. The meat’s bones are cut and removed and the meat is washed in warm water. With the clean meat we do dices about 2 cm (1 inch). The butter and the oil are heated in deep frying pan on strong flame or hot plate and the meat dices is fried on every side.
When turning the lamb dices on last side, we put the heat to medium and leave it that way to keep steaming for 30 minutes.
We add the peeled onions and sliced garlic in the pan and spread the ground red pepper over them. Add the ground tomato. Pour hot water so all the stew is covered. Salt, ground cumin and bay leaf.
Leave it for another 30 minutes with pan lid to cook and before you remove it (literally the last few minutes) add a dozen of spearmint leaves.