Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some new recipes I've been trying at home since I've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I have some regular recipes I do like to try new things and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried.
Sean and I enjoy tofu a lot, so I've been trying different tofu sauces to see which one is the best. We've tried a few before and found this mapo tofu one from a trip to China we took earlier in the year.
They have instructions in the back, but it's pretty simple anyway.
Here are the ingredients I used:
- 300g smooth tofu
- 150g egg tofu
- spinach
- 150g nai bai
- carrot
- 1 pack mapo tofu sauce
- 3 cups of rice
I like using two types of tofu when I make mapo tofu so that there's extra protein from the egg tofu but also to give some variety.
Step 1: Wash the rice and cook in a rice cooker.
Step 2: Wash and slice the veggies. I like the slice my carrots julienne unless I'm making rice. The nai bai is quite small so all I did was chop off the bottoms of the stems and separate the leaves.
Step 2: Boil the veggies in a pot of boiling water.
Step 3: Slice the egg tofu into discs and the smooth tofu into cubes.
Step 4: Add the tofu into the boiling pot with the veggies.
Step 5: Drain the pot until there's just a thin layer of water left, then add in the sauce.
Step 6: Mix the sauce in with the tofu and veggies, adding more water if necessary.
Step 7: By now the rice would be done cooking in the rice cooker just in time.
Then it's time to serve! Sean even topped his plate with some fried lard he bought from a hawker stall.
The sauce was very tasty! I thought it'd be quite spicy from how red it looked but it was actually quite acceptable. Maybe it's because of how much ingredients I had compared to the amount of sauce that was in the packet. I think I ended up using twice the amount of tofu that was recommended but it was alright because we get more value and nutrients out of the sauce this way.
Overall I thought this sauce was delicious! It had a more numbing (the "ma" part of mapo tofu) feeling due to more Sichuan peppercorns but it was still yummy.
I'm not sure if it's our favourite sauce but I wouldn't mind buying this again since it was pretty cheap. I think Sean's favourite is still the Japanese version of mapo tofu though.
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
