After a discussion with friends Alan and Lyn, I decided to make some Mapo Tofu. I was rooting around in the pantry and found a package of tofu skins and thought, great, I'll make some bean curd skin rolls and we can enjoy a spicy dish and a not spicy dish.
I quickly got to work, found a recipe, and started chopping things madly. Soaked the tree ear mushrooms, gave up looking for my dried shitake mushrooms and decided to chop other veg instead. For the rolls I quickly prepared some slivered carrots, cabbage and cucumbers. To the meat, I used beef, I added the requisite minced tree ears, garlic, ginger, cornstarch, sesame oil, shao xing wine, and soy sauce. Stir like mad to combine and voila! meat filling.
Next, I opened the package of bean curd or tofu skins and realized that this was going to be a nightmare scenario. The sheets were folded up onto themselves so that each "page" was multiple layers thick. I dunked them in the warm water, fiddled with them, and tried to pry the layers apart. This was not going to work at all. So I had to go to plan B with this. I decided to soak 2 pages and then just chop up the result and saute everything in the wok.
Mapo, I have written about many times. Last night, I was pressed for time, AND hungry, so I went with the easiest method possible. Stir fried the meat and ginger, added in 2 T of doujiabang sauce and then splashed on some soy, shaoxing, rice vinegar, and anything else I felt like throwing in.
Since I had some soaked tree ear mushrooms I threw them in and, well, that was a mistake. I should have cut them into smaller pieces, instead I just hacked a large piece into quarters or sixths, and they were just too damn big and chewy.
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| Mapo Tofu |
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| Deconstructed Tofu Skin Rolls |
The combo was quite tasty, Bill was going back for more. I was pretty happy with the deconstructed rolls, and would probably tweak that a bit more going forward, like, buying fresher bean curd skins and actually making the rolls! But as an invented dinner save, it was pretty damn good.
