This comfort food envelopes you in warm, fuzzy feelings. This recipe can be doubled or tripled for batch cooking to leave extras for freezing. It's versatile -- substitute any ground meat and serve with vegetables, noodles, toast, or soup.
Crush and peel the garlic cloves. Chop the garlic into rough pieces.
Wash and roughly chop the shiitake mushrooms.
Cook the ground meat
Heat the big soup pot over high heat on the stove. Add canola oil into the soup pot.
Once the oil starts to shimmer, add the chopped green onion and garlic. Stir fry the aromatics for 30 seconds.
Add the ground meat into the soup pot. Break up the ground meat into big chunks.
Pour both the dark and light soy sauce into the ground meat.
Stir the soy sauce into the meat until evenly blended. Lower the heat to medium-high. Cook the ground meat until there is only a touch of pink left, about 5 minutes.
Cook the mushrooms
While cooking the meat, use the back of the spoon to squish any chunks of meat to break up each clump of meat. Taste the meat to determine if the dish is salty enough.
Add the chopped shiitake mushrooms.
If the meat sauce isn't salty enough yet, add the extra salt. Stir in the salt and allow the mushrooms to cook and release their water.
Optional: crumble tofu into the dish to stretch the meat and add protein. If you're omitting the tofu, then skip this step. If cooking the tofu, stir the crumbled tofu into the dish until well mixed.
Cook until the meat is fully cooked. There should be no pink or red left.
Enjoy your aromatic meat sauce with shiitake mushroom!