Lamb stewed in wine

This delicious dish was the product of a perfect storm in home cooking -- a great recipe from my cookbook of the month, Anna Del Conte's The Classic Food of Northern Italy; a lamb shoulder roast from Blue Rooster farm in Pennsylvania, which sells its own meat products once a month at our Sheridan School farmer's market; and the simmer burner on our new Bosch gas cooktop, which truly does allow a slow simmer.

Almost any lamb stew is going to taste great, but this soupy stew from Tuscany is a real winner. The 2-1/2 boneless lamb shoulder was tied up as a roast but of course is ideal for stewing. I trimmed out most of the fat and cut into small chunks. The recipe calls for "lamb neck fillets" but Anna Del Conte clearly lives in a different world than I do, where your choices at supermarket butcher counters are limited to lamb chops and leg of lamb. You heat up olive oil and briefly flavor it with peeled garlic cloves, removing them when you smell the garlic, then brown the meat, in batches if necessary, and salt when done. Pour in 2 c. of dry white wine to cover and add the unpeeled cloves from 2 heads of garlic and 2 or 3 dried red chiles soaked in warm water and broken up into pieces (I used New Mexico chiles I had on hand). Simmer for half an hour then add 2 Tbl. tomato paste and 1 Tbl. chopped rosemary and simmer for another hour. Del Conte seems worried that the stew might dry out and you'd need to top up with boiling water, but I don't think that's possible with as much water as meat today gives off. In any case, my stew remained very soupy.

The meat was incredibly tender and the flavor intense but well-balanced. I served it with soft polenta, baked in the oven without cheese according to Paula Wolfert's great technique. A nice 2009 Bordeaux to accompany and you've got a great meal -- on a weekday!

Typically, and what makes this cookbook so wonderful, Del Conte got this recipe from an innkeeper in the little town of Pitigliano, where the dish appears on the menu as Buglione dell'Albergo Guastini.