ShepherdsDog ShepherdsDog:
We ate a few Buddhist run restaurants when we were in Taiwan and the food was pretty good. There was one really good restaurant that worked wonders with textured tofu, and created imitation meat dishes. They had a pine nut soup that was amazing. Most regular Chinese dishes have some meat in them, but it's mostly vegetable. I miss a lot of the food from there......and the convenience. Much of the stuff here is drowned in sweet sauce.
Establishments I go to use
'textured vegetable protien', and it's pretty neat. They can steam it and shape it into anything. They use it to make fake 'shrimp' for soups for example, and it's better than shrimp in many ways. They also do passable beef and chicken, and almost passable fish fillets. They all taste pretty good, just the texture is off.
I sometimes use it too, if I want to make fat free, high protien meals like burgers, tacos or chili.