Mapo Tofu (or Pockmarked-Face Lady's Tofu)

Mapo tofu is one of my favorite dishes.  There are sauce packets for mapo tofu such as this:

but it's so easy to get much better results.

I've tried many different chili sauces, bean pastes, etc. and have finally settled on one that I think works very well for this dish.  There's even a recipe for Mapo Tofu printed on the label.  If you can't find this particular brand, then I suppose any other toban djan (豆瓣酱 or douban jiang) would work just as well.

I normally don't like to use canned foods, but I will make an exception for canned mushrooms because they are pretty convenient.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_doufu

Ma stands for "mazi" (Pinyin: mázi Traditional Chinese 麻子,) which means a person disfigured by pockmarks. Po (Chinese 婆) translates as "old woman". Hence, Ma Po is an old woman whose face was pockmarked. It is thus sometimes translated as "Pockmarked-Face Lady's Tofu". Legend says that the pock-marked old woman (má pó) was a widow who lived in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Due to her condition, her home was placed on the outskirts of the city. By coincidence, it was near a road where traders often passed. Although the rich merchants could afford to stay within the numerous inns of the prosperous city while waiting for their goods to sell, poor farmers would stay in cheaper inns scattered along the sides of roads on the outskirts of the ancient city. Another less widely accepted explanation stems from an alternate definition of 麻, meaning "numb": the Szechuan peppercorns used in the dish numb the diner's mouth.


According to Mrs. Chiang's Szechwan Cookbook: "Eugene Wu, the Librarian of the Harvard Yenching Library, grew up in Chengtu and claims that as a schoolboy he used to eat Pock-Marked Ma's Bean Curd ormapo doufu, at a restaurant run by the original Pock-Marked Ma herself. You ordered by weight, so many grams of bean curd and so many grams of meat, and your serving would be weighed out and cooked as you watched. It arrived at the table fresh, fragrant, and so spicy hot, or la, that it actually caused sweat to break out."


Ingredients
1 block of tofu, 14 oz. cut in 1/2 inch cubes (I used soft)
4 oz. ground pork
4 oz. mushrooms (I used canned)
1/3 c. peas (I used frozen Petite Peas from Trader Joe's)
3 TBSP toban djan (I used Lee Kum Kee brand Chili Bean Sauce)
water
1 TBSP corn starch
1 stalk of green onion, chopped

Directions

1. Brown the ground pork in a pan over MED heat, for about 1 minute.

2. Add the mushrooms and a little liquid to deglaze the pan (I used the liquid from the canned mushrooms. If you use fresh mushrooms, add 2-3 TBSP of water).

3. Add 1/2 c. water and the toban djan to to the pan.

4. Make a slurry of corn starch and about 2 TBSP of water.  Add the slurry to the pan to thicken the sauce.  The sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.  You can reduce the heat and simmer the sauce.

5. Add the tofu.  Toss gently to combine.

6. Add the peas and cook until heated through, maybe 2-3 minutes.

7. Garnish with green onion and serve with rice.