Mapo Tofu You.
one of the recipes I had bookmarked early this year (when I was not eating land animals) was this vegan mapo tofu. the author claims his family likes it better than the regular version. the recipe is hard to follow, I stressed over it for a while, and I gave up on finding broad bean chili paste. I didn't want to drive north to the asian market. I substituted it with gochujang.
On the second attempt (yes, it's so good we had it 2x in a few days) we left out the kombu, nobody missed it. I have this one solved.
I'll give you the cheat sheet to make the recipe easy. just chop and fry up 6-8 oz of button mushrooms to replace the pork. rehydrate and chop some woodear and porcini mushrooms, retain the mushroom broth and use that instead of chicken stock. chop the rehydrated mushrooms along with some pickled mustard to stir in with the fried mushrooms (pork substitute).
(about 8 oz of chopped button mushrooms in the wok quickly reduced by half)
finished fried mushrooms are about 1/4 original volume or less. the oil is drained off and reused.
another adjustment we did, we fried and removed ALL the szechuan peppercorns (above). we tried it as written the first time, crushing half and adding them before serving. nobody appreciated biting into peppercorn chunks. I also added some thai chili flake, because we like it really spicy.
we put in a little extra pickled mustard, because we love that stuff. sauce bubbley and thickened, tofu added...
I need to adjust further to increase the portion. it's really good.
when I was done, it all made sense. I figured I could cut the time it took me by more than half (and I was right). it also helped for me to read a regular mapo tofu recipe, this one is very similar but uses pork.
WIMBERLEY:
like mother, like daughter. we often stop off at Trudy's (half way point between our wimberley place and our austin home)
this is what real salsa looks like. you can see individual components, including fresh ingredients. back on the east coast (90's), I had a hard time finding real salsa. most tex-mex/"mexican" restaurants there treated salsa like catsup, they ordered it by the jug from Sysco.
we hired a tree service to mulch up our mountains of cedar trees. we have NO more cedars! of course there is now a clear view to the tear-down. I've started the deconstruction, and we have most of the contents removed.
all the trees are coming back to life. we have several BIG healthy trees. we went down to the river... and somebody took a kat nap on a rock.
