Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Also I'm running out of content so yeah gotta make the most of it!
So recently, Sean has been eating a lot of tofu lately and I thought it'd be interesting to try and cook one of his favourite dishes - mapo tofu!
Source: Serious Eats
I'm sure many people would've at least heard of it before, but just in case you haven't tried it before, Mapo Tofu is a popular Chinese dish from Sichuan Province, where spicy food is king and the signature spice of the region––the Sichuan Peppercorn––gives dishes a unique “numbing” effect. It’s almost like the Sichuan peppercorns are there to not only add their fragrance and flavor, but also to numb your tongue so it can take more heat! (Source: The Woks of Life)
Although the whole point of the mapo tofu is the numbing aspect ("ma" means numb in Chinese), neither Sean nor I actually like that part of the dish, or the Sichuan peppercorn. We like the spice part and the other flavours definitely, but not the numbing part.
But anyway like the title implies, I can only kinda cook, so I wasn't going to be making this from scratch since I don't have the time nor energy to do that. So for this meal we went with something simple, and a shortcut.
Ingredients:
- Rice
- Carrots
- Chinese Spinach
- Frozen broccoli and cauliflower
- Tofu
- Chinese sausage (to be air-fried)
- mapo tofu paste
Here were most of the ingredients we'd be using.
And our secret package is this Mapo Doufu Paste by AsiaJoy!
So step 1: wash 2 cups of white rice
Step 2: boil a pot of water and cut the carrots into little pieces so they'd cook faster. Not pictured, but also wash the spinach and put them into the pot too.
Step 3: once the water has boiled, pour the carrots into the pot.
Step 3: cook the rice in the rice cooker.
I had 2 carrots on hand so I split the entire portion and put half in the pot and half in the rice cooker to cook with the rice together with some the frozen vegetables. I was going to use up all the frozen veggies but then remembered that I also had spinach so I just put in a few pieces.
Step 4: prep the tofu.
by cutting them into cubes.
Step 5: once the veggies have been boiled sufficiently, put the tofu in.
Next it was time to take out the paste! The packet itself was pretty simple-looking.
Step 6: Before dumping the mapo tofu paste in, make sure to scoop out some excess water if you have to, since mapo tofu is more of a gravy/sauce and we don't want it to be diluted. As you can see there was barely any water left after I boiled the vegetables because I let the water evaporate as well.
And even then it was still a little too watery.
So step 7: make sure to not cover the pot and let the excess water evaporate while you stir and mix in the paste with the water, vegetables and tofu.
After a while, it should look more like a gravy something like this!
Sean also wanted some meat so he air-fried some of these oriental sausages at 190 degrees for 9 minutes.
And they turned out delicious! Crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside:
And this was our meal!
The mapo tofu paste was maybe a bit too little for how much ingredients we had in the pot. But it was still really delicious and definitely had more than enough flavour so it paired with our rice well.
It was definitely too our liking too, since it had the spice but not so much of the numbing. I wouldn't call it authentic mapo tofu because of that, but we like it better this way anyway. And Sean really loved it he wolfed it all down and finished his plate in less than 5 minutes!
The sausage was good too since it was a little sweet, so it also paired with the spiciness of the mapo tofu sauce well! All in all, a really yummy but simple meal!
We've actually tried another brand of mapo tofu paste before, but I think this one is definitely a lot better and tastier! I know a lot of chefs would frown upon using these pre-packaged pastes, sauces and the like but since I'm not a chef and I don't fancy taking lots of time in the kitchen preparing meals, I think this is more than good enough. And it tastes good too, so win-win all round!
Thanks so much for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
