A One pot dish that’s sure to warm you up!
With winter in full swing, we wanted to travel a bit to our favourite island in the Mediterranean: Crete (see this post for a 1 week holiday report)! Of Greek origins, this dish takes about an hour to make and is very simple with 3 main ingredients: meat, tomatoes and orzo. This version is made with lamb but you can easily replace it with beef, pork or chicken.
Servings
4
Prep time:
15 min
Cook time:
1 hour
Difficulty:
Easy
Ingredients
- 3 tbsp Olive oil
- 500g Lamb shoulder, diced
- 2 medium onions, chopped
- 1 Rosemary sprig
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tsp allspice, ground
- 100ml white wine
- 1/2 tbsp salt
- 1kg fresh Tomatoes, chopped (or alternatively, 2 cans of chopped tomatoes)
- 300ml stock (preferrably lamb stock, but chicken, vegetable or beef stock will do as well)
- 100g baby spinach
- 150g Orzo (dry)
- additional Salt & Pepper to taste
Notes:
– Our recipe includes white wine, but you can completely omit it without changing the taste too much, I just felt like deglazing the lamb and onions and bit to bring out the juices before adding the tomatoes 🙂
– Traditionally, this would be slow cooked in a “Güveç” (see here for Giouvetsi and here for Guvec on wikipedia), a clay pot that’s similar to a Tagine or Rummertopf (if you have either on hand, that’s a good way to make use of it!); this also means that cooking this in a slow cooker is most definitely doable as well, just add the orzo and spinach at the very end, 10 minutes before serving.
– This time around, we added the orzo straight in so that it absorbed the sauce which is what you want, but make sure you stir it around as it can start to stick to the bottom of your casserole dish and burn if you leave it for too long. A good way to prevent this is to cook the orzo separately and add it at the very end. If so, cook the orzo like you would pasta, following the pack instructions (usually added to boiling salted water and cooked for 5 minutes until al dente).
Step by Step Instructions
Step 1
Heat a large casserole pan and add the olive oil before adding the diced lamb. Cook for about 3 to 5 minutes or until slightly browned and remove from the pan and set aside.
Step 2
Add the onions to the casserole and let them golden in the oil/lamb fat for another 5 minutes.
Step 3
Add the lamb back into the pan, along with the salt, allspice, bay leaves and rosemary sprig. Stir things together for a couple of minutes to make sure the spices mix with the lamb and onions.
Step 4
Throw in your liquids, in our case, I started with deglazing the lamb and onions with a bit of white wine before adding the tomatoes and the stock.
Reduce the heat to medium-low (about 5 on an electric or induction hob) and simmer for 45 to 50 minutes with a lid partially covering the casserole (to get a bit of the moisture out, but not too much), stirring every now and then to make sure it doesn’t start burning the bottom.
Step 5
Stir in the orzo, then add your spinach leaves and cook for about 5 minutes or until the orzo is cooked and the spinach has wilted.
Serve in shallow plates or bowls and add the crumbled cheese individually.
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