Dooboo Jorim (두부조림) - Braised Tofu

Dooboo Jorim (두부조림) is literally "braised tofu."  I think this name is a bit misleading, because when I think of braising, I think of a long, slow cooking process, whereas the tofu in this dish was only cooked for about 10 minutes.  Perhaps a better name might be "twice-cooked tofu."

I had some tofu that I needed to use up.  I've also had this giant Costco-sized bottle of Mr. Yoshida's sauce for what seems like forever.  Mr. Yoshida's is sort of thick and sweet, but it actually was perfect for this dish. It combines soy sauce, sweetener (in the form of corn syrup), mirin (rice wine), and some other spices.  This was also a good opportunity to finish off an onion (I had 1/8 of a medium onion left) as well as some green onions.

This was pretty tasty, but it was also quite spicy.  I think I happened to get a pretty spicy serrano.

Crispy tofu cakes with sweet chili sauce

These crispy tofu cakes were the result of some experimentation.  At dim sum today, I saw on the menu something called "salt & pepper pi-pa tofu" and I had no idea what it was (and we did not order it).  A web search revealed recipes for pi-pa tofu, but I decided to take this in a slightly different direction.

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.