Lamb and couscous on lettuce leaves with miso, new miso shipment unboxing

The lamb did not go according to plan. It was not very good.

The thing is, the lamb chunks were coated and fried over a week ago and the surplus cooked chunks sat there in the refrigerator all this time available for nibbling. The lamb was tougher than I expected right out of the pan and even more tough when chilled. I lost enthusiasm for it so they mostly just sat there. 

The last time I fried chunks of lamb I just wanted to put a char on them then pressure cook the chunks for ultimate tenderness. That time the lamb chunks were more tender straight out of the pan than they were after the chunks were pressure cooked. The unnecessary pressure cooking stage made them worse. 

This time the lamb chunks were tough right out the pan and you know what that means. It means it's mutton! 

I figure lambs are probably like cattle in that all the lambs born in a single year are counted as yearling no matter when they were born during that year so you could get a lamb relatively older than the others and still be a lamb. I am guessing that's what happened here. 

The cooked lamb chunks languished in the refrigerator because I didn't like them anymore. I considered tossing them out to make way for better things. I planned and thawed a beef rib-eye to fashion into a fortified miso soup using the new miso. Then I thought, "Yo, Dog, why don't you give this mutton one more chance and pressure cook it."  So I did. Glad too because that tenderized the remaining lamb surprisingly well and salvaged about 1/3 of the lamb roast. 

I went with the darker azuki bean miso. It's a little bit salty. 

I must tell you the plate shown at the top with three lettuce cups with a bed of couscous and a chunk of lamb topped with diced onion is not the way the plate was consumed. I'm just playing. I'm showing you the separate ingredients piled up. In reality more couscous was scooped onto the platter along with more lamb chunks on top of that with abundant liquid from the pressure cooked lamb. It was a mound amounting to three times that much.