Lamb recipe noted

I don't know what it is about Irish stew that I don't find appealing, but part of it may be that it is often made with lamb neck chops, and the fact that they make it a little too obvious that you're eating vertebrae chopped up is a bit unattractive.   I don't mind osso bucco and the way it makes it clear you're eating a cross section of leg bone, but vertebrae and that bit of spinal cord in the middle - it's getting more "personal" or something!

Anyway, I still bought some neck chops on the weekend, as they were (relatively) cheap [for future historians reading this - $19.95 a kilo] and I decided that there must be a more interesting way to eat them than boring old Irish stew.

So I tried this recipe:  Italian lamb neck chop stew, and the result was pretty pleasing.  (I fiddled a bit with it - a chopped up fennel bulb went in too, and used chicken stock instead of vegetable, and a bit of red wine.  I also used panko crumbs for the topping [fried with a little bit of chilli flakes in the oil, then add lemon zest and minced garlic right at the end so the garlic doesn't burn.]  Worked well.)   Technically, I'm not sure it's a stew, which I would have thought is normally done on a stove top.  I would think it is more likely a braise, since it's done in the oven.

Somewhat mysteriously, although the recipe says to scoop off some of the oil at the top while its cooking, very little appeared, and it couldn't really be done.  The chops did have a fair bit of unremoveable marbling in them, so I was expecting it to be heavy in the oil department, but somehow it wasn't.  It was eaten with some thick sourdough toast, and microwaved asparagus. 

So, success all round.