Slow Cooker Rosemary Lamb Shanks

Having some time off over the holidays meant that I had rare time and energy to do some cooking that involved more than me scrambling around the kitchen madly throwing stuff in pans, hoping fervently that I would finish before I either (a) passed out from hunger; or (b) had to be somewhere with dish in hand.  It was chilly outside, we were having a friend over for dinner, and had a rare day with nowhere to be, so I was inspired to try my hand at slow cooking some lamb shanks.

I used this recipe as a base, but it wasn't made for a slow cooker, so I sort of winged it. Happily, I was very pleased with the results.

Slow Cooker Rosemary Lamb Shanks

Ingredients
4-6 lamb shanks (The ones at our market were HUGE - about 1.5 lbs each - so four was the most I could fit in our slow cooker)
2 T olive oil
2 yellow onions, chopped
15 cloves garlic, minced
1 10-oz package baby bella mushrooms, sliced
1 c red wine (I used cabernet sauvignon)
2 10.5-oz cans beef broth
4-5 stalks fresh rosemary
2 t chopped fresh thyme

Directions
1.  Spread onions, garlic and mushrooms over the bottom of your slow cooker.

2.  Add olive oil to heavy pan and heat. Working in batches, brown the lamb shanks on all sides. Transfer shanks to slow cooker.

3.  Pour red wine and beef broth over the top of the shanks. Add rosemary and thyme. It should look about like this:

4.  Cook on the High setting for 5.5 hours.

5.  The juices are delicious but very runny when you are done, so if you like, you can pour the liquid into a pan and reduce it to make more of a gravy consistency.  I'm not a huge gravy person, so I skipped this step.

The meat will be falling off the bone.  I served it with couscous I made using an Ina Garten recipe from a cookbook my awesome sister-in-law recommended (I'll blog about this separately). It turned out pretty delicious, if I do say so myself. And it was so easy. I'm usually scrambling around at the last second finishing things up when we have people over for dinner; this time, I was calm, the kitchen was clean, and all I had to do was dish up the goods.

Definitely a keeper recipe. I plan to carve out a day to make this at least one more time before it's 100 degrees here again.