Lamb "Stroganoff"

Bought lamb shoulder and put it in the rice cooker with mixed mushrooms (crimini, shimeiji, field, abalone, shiitake), carrots, and whole wheat rotelle pasta. For flavor, I had paprika, Kerrygold butter, salt, and pepper. I dumped in a lot of the rotelle pasta, dry, so I had to add SOME kind of liquid, and settled on half a bottle of Reggiano Lambrusco, which is a very affordable ($5) Italian soft red wine from Trader Joes. It's actually very drinkable so I didn't really have to cook with it but it's been sitting around so why not? It's basically a bubbly sweet red, but not cloyingly sweet.

So the trick to using the rice cooker for tender meat is to cook the dish for several rounds in the rice cooker. Embarrassingly, I can't advise on how to do this using the modern rice cookers. For the trusty old school Tatung ones, all you do is just keep pressing the simple lever down, giving it about 20 minutes in between the time the lever pops up and the next time you press it down, and possibly adding some water if the lever pops up too quickly after starting the second round.

Anyway I personally thought the lamb was tender (probably due to the multiple tablespoons of butter), and the pasta fluffed up nicely with the wine and with the butter giving it an extra smooth texture. I was going to add some nonfat yogurt and call it a stroganoff, but when the dish came out of the rice cooker, it didn't look like it wanted to be tampered with, so I left it alone and served it without the yogurt. Again, I really liked this dish, although it was definitely on the rich side, even without any dairy (so rich, in fact, that I actually needed tea afterwards to balance it out). Kevin, however, was not a fan. He liked the lamb but not the pasta, citing excess sauce as his reason.