Ha! Very Frenchy name, isn't it? Well, of course it's Frenchy because it's French. What makes French words Frenchy is the 'r' sound. The more 'r' sounds there are in a word or a sentence, the more Frenchy it sounds.
I'm Japanese and teach Japanese and English. I speak Beginner's French. My son goes to a French school. One of my best friends is Italian. My ex-husband is Irish, and I used to have an American boyfriend. What I noticed is this letter 'r' and its pronunciation is the most tricky and different one out of all the other alphabets in all these languages I experienced. French 'r' being the most prominent, Italian 'r', English 'r', and Irish 'r' are ('r') all different with Japanese 'r' being even close to 'l'.
What this means is that if you pronounce 'r' sound correctly in whatever language you are learning, then you would sound approximately native. On the flip side, if you pronounce this sound wrongly you would sound foreign no matter how fluent you are...
Sorry about this boring observation, but language is my job and I personally find it fascinating.
Ingredients (for 3-4 people):
(for the lamb)
half of boned shoulder of lamb (shoulder I insist), cubed into 4-5cm dice
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 carrot, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2-3 thyme sprigs
1 bay leaf
olive oil
2 teaspoon of tomato purée
1 tablespoon of flour
500ml chicken stock
(for spring veg)
2 onions, sliced thickly
3 carrots, cut diagonally into 4-5cm pieces
6 small new potatoes
50g peas (frozen or fresh)
50g French beans, cut in half
(...and)
a handful of mint leaves, roughly chopped
1 garlic, finely chopped
Trim off any major fatty bits from the lamb, and sprinkle some salt and pepper on them. Coat the pieces of lamb with flour. You will need thick-based casserole for this. Fry the lamb in some olive oil on high heat. You don't need to cook through. All we need here is nice brown colour.
Lift them onto a plate, and fry onions, carrots, and garlic in the same pan. Return the lamb into the pan, and add tomato purée, chicken stock, and the herbs. You might want to add a bit more salt and pepper here. When it starts boiling, turn down the heat to a minimum, and cook very gently for about an hour. (You can cool this mixture and freeze here, if you like.)
Cook all the spring vegetables, apart from peas, separately in salted boiling water, not too hard and not too soft. Drain them and set aside.
Remove the lamb pieces from the casserole and put the sauce through a sieve into a biggish bowl. Squeeze as much liquid from the sauce as possible. Return the meat and put all the vegetables into the bowl and transfer the whole thing back into the casserole. Add the peas and heat through. Just before serving add the chopped mint and garlic. Génial!