Good-MORNING, Chums. We'll be dining a la Vietnam on Friday--6 pm in our backyard (so bring a wrap). In the spirit of a communist country where some are more equal than others, I'M going to dictate the menu. Choose
from the following and I will send the corresponding recipe to you later today.

Hi Kristen:

Salads in Vietnam are similar to French-style mixed green salads although they tend to feature the softer lettuces (I never saw romaine there, for example) but the big difference is that they always include whole herb leaves--especially mint and basil--in generous quantity.  For a dressing: just a simple vinaigrette with rice wine vinegar, not too acid.

xx Casey

Whole leaves of herbs?  This sounded like the salad would be way too strong, but I do as I'm told and went around my garden for baby kale, mint, basil, marjoram, chive flowers and nasturtium leaves and flowers.  The rest of the soft lettuces would be purchased at the store: baby spinach, a mix of Asian lettuces, and butter lettuce.  My dressing was simply rice vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.  Readers, this salad was a hit--I loved it so much, and by the look of the empty salad bowl at the end of the evening, everyone else felt the same.  If you recreate this salad at home, please don't be shy with the whole leaves of herbs.  Springtime is the perfect time for this as the herbs are very tender and mild.  This is going to be our new, every-night salad.  Here's a snippet of another email from Casey:   We learned at a cooking class in VN that they eat a lot of greens as it's pretty much their only source of calcium as they don't eat any dairy. So salad like this is always on an entree plate and at one restaurant the waiter gently scolded us for not wrapping pieces of our omelet around some greens.

Another note: the eggplant and green bean recipes are from the beautiful new "Slanted Door" cookbook--a lovely record of the food served at the wildly popular San Francisco restaurant Slanted Door in the beloved Ferry Building.

At the end of dinner, my tablemates and I cut into the pretty centerpieces of dragon fruit and exotic melons.  Besides being very pretty, they were very light and we all agreed, very delicious too.  Our California weather can only hold out so long, so we ended up in the pool house for coffee and fruit kebabs topped with a chocolate truffle!