"I didn't even know I was hungry" (The Food Appreciation Thread)

By popular request: How to make mapo nasu. (With a bonus recipe in How to Make Mapo Dofu!)

You will need:
Garlic (lots)
Pork mince (~100 grams per serving)
An eggplant (I made about two and a half servings, and used about half a large eggplant)
Miso paste
Soy Sauce
Chilli (I use red bean chilli paste, you probably don't have to be so pernickety)
Cornflour

Fry the garlic and pork mince in a deepish pan until you have cooked mince. Slice the eggplant however you like; you may have an aversion of some kind to either the teeny tiny brownish seeds in the middle or the rather rubbery outer skin. Remove those if you have beef with 'em. I like to not have my eggplant pieces falling apart into fibrous mush in my food so I keep a strip of skin to each piece; however you do it is your prerogative.

Add the eggplant. Add water to cover the eggplant and mince, add miso paste (quite a many tablespoons), soy sauce (a splash or several), and chilli to taste. Leave to simmer (with a lid on if you've got one), add a teaspoon or so of cornflour as the eggplant starts to cook. It'll go from whitish and spongy to translucent and less cucumber-like. Add more of those aforementioned seasonings as the sauce thickens if it still doesn't taste how you want it. White wine, sugar, or pepper may also be added in, but don't add salt. Miso and soy sauce have more than enough salt. Ketchup might work? I dunno.

Cook some rice. (Or cook some rice before you got started cooking. Else you'll probably be nibbling at eggplant all evening waiting for the rice to cook and have none left to actually eat.) Serve with rice in a rice bowl, mapo nasu in bigger bowl, and pick out the big bits and eat them with rice. As you get down to the sauce and can no longer use chopsticks, pour the remaining pork and sauce and bits of eggplant you saved for later (because they're the best bit) on top of your rice (or rice versa), yell "DON'T JUDGE ME" at any rice-eating purists around you.

Mapo nasu is easily converted in to mapo dofu if you use cubes of tofu instead of eggplant. In this case, add the tofu after the cornflour, because stirring it up too much will leave you with a disappointing tofu-fragment-filled mess rather than delicious little morsels.