@Omnedon I love spicy foods but unfortunately have developed an intolerance to spicy stuff the past few years. I rarely eat restaurant food because I prefer my own cooking (and living in a rural community there usually isn't much offered at local restaurants that I can eat). Being of Chinese-Indonesian ancestry, I always have tofu stocked up in my house, and of course, lots of rice. I don't think there is anything at our local Chinese restaurants that I can actually eat, except may be mixed vegetables and steamed rice, and I don't even know what they cook the vegetables in or what is in the sauce. There is a Vietnamese restaurant in the city that I like to eat at when I go to the city and one day I found out that the tofu in their tofu vermicelli bowl is cooked in fish oil. Yuck!!! If I cook something myself, I always know what exactly I'm eating.

@Omnedon I like spiciness that has flavour and not simply hot. I started having an intolerance when I accidentally dumped a ton of cayenne pepper into a pan of veggie ground round. I didn't want to throw it all in the garbage because veggie ground round isn't cheap. I should have thrown it all out!!!! LOL. It was a miserable few days but after that I also can no longer eat anything spicy without consequences. I cook my own meals almost 100% of the time, and also bake cookies, cakes, cupcakes, etc. and make breads. I use tofu in veggie stir fries, but also as tofu scramble, crumbles for pasta, substitute for ricotta cheese in lasagna, substitute for eggs for french toast, desserts (soft tofu), etc. My mom cooks tofu so the interior is soft and the outer parts crispy but I didn't like that texture and I used to hate tofu. I prefer my tofu crispy or crunchy all over. Now I'm pretty much a tofu addict!!!

@Omnedon I cook everyday because I almost have to. I’m a vegan living in rural beef country. Luckily I can still find plenty of items I can eat and cook at the only grocery store in town.

@Omnedon Limited compared to the city but not too bad.

I was just about to tell him that! AND...here's a hint....freeze the tofu, defrost, drain and press all the water out into a kitchen towel. Then cook it. Perfect texture!

@Omnedon Leaves more for us!

@LucyLoohoo I suppose someone has to eat it.

@Gatovicolo Obviously, you've never had it cooked well. Sorry about that.

Ok. It helps a lot that it's for a group. Ha, ha.
That explains the container too.

The idea reminded me of a trip my wife and I took about 30 years ago -- before we changed our diets. On Malta I ordered a 'Sausage Pie' in a decent restaurant for $12 -- but when it came it was pigs-in-a-blanket -- prefab croissant rolls wrapped around hot dogs. Lol.

Thinking about it, most of that trip was good foodwise. The other strong food memory I have is from a cafe west of Trevi in Rome. We'd been walking all day and were very tired so we just ordered one dinner to share between us.
The waiter apparently decided we were skimping because that was all we could afford so a couple of minutes later two big bowls of delicious lentil soup showed up.
The waiter kept saying -- 'Just to try. Just to try.'. Ha, ha.

@RichCC HAH! Reminds me of a dinner we had in Egypt. People love to eat outdoors there and this little home-like restaurant had a table under some trees...men silently moving around the table, serving umpteen courses...really lovely. Then came the ''squab'' course. I'd never tried squab but...it was ok.

It was OK until I realized that there were pigeons all around us! WAIT! PIGEONS?

When ''in Rome."

@LucyLoohoo Yeah. My father wanted homing pigeons so we always had a walk-in loft. We ended up pretty knowledgeable about the birds but we never got around to trying to make squab for dinner. I think mostly because my mother did most of the cooking and had had enough dressing animals at the ranch where she grew up to last her lifetime. Lol.

@RichCC If we weren't so ''civilized''....we'd be ok with eating our ''pets.'' I'm not and can't even imagine raising rabbits or chickens, calves, etc, and then slaughtering them!

Good thing there's TOFU!

@LucyLoohoo My mother's family was very rural. My grandfather homesteaded just northeast of the Grand Canyon 80 or so years ago. I've always found meat distasteful but it was definitely a part of our lives. If you went out to cousins, aunts & uncles, let alone friends, there were always 4 or 5 ranches around the group over the years.

One of my brothers' two kids each did 4-H animals(pigs, sheep, rabbits, steers, and others) for years. I don't care for the program at all.
Not only do elementary to junior high age kids raise animals just to have them killed, but then they have to do things like cold-calling around to sell them. Ugh.
It seems to me to be an awful lot of unpleasantness to put young children through.

My wife and I have been vegetarian for over 20 years now.

@RichCC Maybe I was 4 or 5 when we went to visit my father's family in Florida. These were subsistence farmers only a couple of decades out of the depression, so they ate what they grew. For some reason...it was decided that I'd go out and watch a woman (whose name I've never known) kill chickens. My mother agreed to this.

The HORROR of watching this woman ''wring their necks"...throw them down and then laugh as the body literally ran around the yard....was something I still feel!