Rib-eye with rice, red chile, onions and mushrooms

There are two layers of plain white rice with a layer of miso and wasabi between them. 

The onion slices were lightly splashed with rice vinegar while frying. The scant vinegar changed the onion dramatically. The combination is sweeter than the two elements separate. 

The steak is a rib-eye pulled yesterday to thaw but not used then when my mind was changed to salvaged lamb chunks which turned out better than I had hoped. Half the thawed rib-eye steak is used here today, the other half is still in one piece in the refrigerator. Half of the salvaged lamb chunks are in the refrigerator too so it appears I will be going back and forth between until they're both gone. And when the day comes my thoughts will change from using up the things that are here to shopping because apparently deprivation and dearth is what it takes to motivate.

Is that so bad?  

The red chile peppers were grown on the balcony from seeds scraped from grocery store chiles. These red chiles were dried on the countertop. They are milder than their parent chiles so another different type of chile was included with the onions and the sliced steak, serrano chiles from a tin opened earlier. 

I hope to duplicate this sometime because it is intriguingly delicious and satisfying beyond human grasp. The thin layer of miso and the layer of wasabi together hidden inside the rice is a delightful and impressive combination. And it looks so plain and innocent.   

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. 

Red bean and napa cabbage, spaghetti and rice

Old Napa cabbage along with sliced onion are started in oil in a hot pan.

A shallow tub of leftover red beans is added to the cabbage and onion. With its flavorful liquid the beans are the base of a sauce that is augmented with commercial chicken broth to form a loose soup.

A small amount of thin pasta, less than an ounce, is prepared in tall pot of water and transferred early into the bean soup to finish.

A lump of curried rice, another leftover, is slipped into the liquid along the edge of the pan.

Vinegar is added to the abandoned pasta water for a single egg to poach.

Now, everything is together in the pan heated through except for the poached egg still in the pasta water. The contents of the pan are tipped into a shallow bowl pretty much retaining their positions then topped with the trimmed poached egg. 

Fried eggs with panko

I wanted to coat the egg with Panko Japanese bread crumbs on both sides. I thought the texture would be an interesting change, sort of like having breakfast toast coating the eggs.  The following images explore the texture. 

The bacon is more of the thick slab which fries crisp like jerky so it is cut in length by fourths and cut across in half to make it more manageable. I don't much care for it and I'm not getting it again. 

The gnocchi is from yesterday and it is good now as then.

Gnocchi

The potato is microwaved. Sue me. The potato was jabbed deeply all over the place, microwaved for six minutes, and that resulted in the driest potato I ever saw. That is good for this sort of thing. 

The potato is peeled still hot and run through a ricer. Seasoned. The whole egg is stirred in rapidly before the hot potato can cook it. Then two grabs of sifted flour and mixed. Turned out onto a flour dusted work surface. Potato dough rolled into a snake. Snake shape cut into pieces. Pieces boiled. Floating boiled pieces collected to a bowl with olive oil and then all together into a heated pan with butter and sage. 

A single gnocchi with butter and sage was tasted and deemed insufficient for tonight so the seasoning in pan of buttered gnocchi was supplemented with prepared curry powder and cayenne powder. Better for those two things to have been started first in the pan but it didn't work out that way

This batch of gnocchi is very light and its surfaces disintegrated somewhat in the lightly simmering salted water which then developed an unattractive sloppy surface to individual gnocchi. 

Chicken broth is added to the pan of seasoned butter and  gnocchi along with a splash of white wine which mingled with the butter and olive oil and dissolved the shaggy surfaces which then broke away and blended into the chicken broth butter and wine. It is quite good with a subversive layer of cayenne. 

Flash. When the little detached flash is reversed to diffuse then the background turns from dark  to light and it can look like the plate is appearing from Heaven, but I'm getting a little bit of tired of that.