I’m always interested in adding new options to my menu of things that I can (poorly) cook. I often cook some kind of curry rice (it is one of my favorite dishes, it is easy to make, it stores well, and it is flexible because you can always add some side dishes to it) but it is nice to have some variety. One thing I always look for is a simple dish that I can cook up on the weekend and eat over the week.
One of the things that I ran into lately is Mabo Tofu. Mabo Tofu is a kind of spicy flavored Tofu. I saw a package at the Supermarket that said it is a mix for the stuff, all you have to do is basically add this stuff to Tofu and you are set. Sounds easy enough.
Basically, you make the stuff by cutting up your Tofu into small blocks – this is surprisingly fun, and if you get the hard Tofu it works fairly well – and then add some water to a pot. Put in the flavor packet, and heat it up. While you do this, there is a packet of corn starch that comes with the mix, which you should mix with water. The first time I made this I added ten times too much water, and ended up with a kind of Tofu soup. It was actually really good, and I think I’ll make that sometime in the future as well. If you do it right, you bring down the heat and mix in the thickening agent, then heat it up again. The second time around I also coocked up some hamburger and threw that in – it was great.
Unfortunately, this stuff doesn’t keep very well. After about three or four days it starts to smell bad. It still tastes good, but starts to smell like … rotten bean paste. Well, more like you would imagine rotten bean paste would taste like.
It turns out that it mixes fairly well with Curry too. I don’t mean that you should mix them together, just that having some curry one one side of rice, and Mabo Tofu on the other is pretty good.
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