Second story:
I am at a friend's off-campus house, helping to prepare dinner. The residents of said house are vegans, which means no meat, no eggs, no cheese, etc. So, as was *very* *often* the case, the main couse was tofu. Cooking this up was my responsibility. Recently I had had some tofu at a local restaurant that was fried golden brown on the outside and 'melted' inside - very tasty! I decided to pursue this effect myself.
I was also interested in making the tofu spicy, because I like spicy foods, and so did the other people who were going to eat. So, I diced a habanero pepper and threw it in the pan along with the oil, the plan being that the oils from the pepper would mix with the vegetable oil and soak into the tofu.
Unfortunately, what happened instead was that the habanero pieces burned in the heat, but *only* in the area where they were being pressed against the pan by the tofu. So, until I turned the tofu the fisrt time, everything seemed fine. In fact, for me, standing right next to the pan and therefore somewhat out of the main convection path of the smoke, it seemed like only a minor problem; like garlic or onion put in the oil a little too soon, the pepper had burned. Big deal! It would add a...charming, carmelized taste, right?
Well, that's not what the rest of the house thought. Not thirty seconds after I turned the tofu pieces, someone who had been studying in a room across the house from the kitchen came in, blinking rapidly and covering her mouth.
"What the FUCK are you DOING in here!?!", she asked.
I began to realize that perhaps something was amiss. The smoke from the peppers was *thin*, but it spread *quickly*, and for the people in other rooms of the house, it was like having a mist of habanero pepper sprayed in their faces!
We ended up having to not only abandon the meal, but put fans blowing out in the windows of the kitchen and seal it off from the rest of the house for about forty-five minutes, until the evil spirits had been dispersed.
I was frequently welcomed back to eat, and to cook, but I seem to recall a lot of washing and chopping and other, non-heat-related activities being assigned to me from then on.
