It’s a mapo rice kind of day

I think one of the things that annoys me the most about living abroad is the fact that I live alone and I eat alone.

It’s actually annoying to plan meals for one person. Sure, Jami Oliver can cook up 15 minute meals but I don’t have a processor and all his food gadgets and at the end of the day, I’m cooking just for myself. I was telling a friend that even cooking rice is a pain since if I cook a cup of rice, it’ll last me a week or three days. Sometimes, I even forget I had rice so it tends to spoil. On other days, I want to dish up something fancy only to find that the grocery sells things at cheaper prices if you buy it in bulk.

I think the last six months was a learning process on how to make the most out of my food and how to make dishes without overspending or cooking unhealthy all the time. One solution I have is to make a large batch of food which I reheat throughout the week. I usually make two dishes in big batches so that I don’t get tired of it and I cook it on the weekends so that I don’t get spent. Usually, one dish can be made for soups or salads, another is a dish I can easily mix with rice or pasta.

In this case, I had some left over rice and left over mapo tofu. Mapo tofu essentially follows the same recipe as my mapo beans. In this case, rather than beans, I used zucchini and some other veggies. I stir-fried the lot and was quite pleased with the result. In fact, I even burnt it a little to make this awesome crunchy okoge. Sorry Kimutaku, every girl just loves her okoge.

Usually, mapo tofu’s the kind that folks love rather saucy over rice but this stir-fried kind was kinda awesome as well.