Rice noodles, spring salad mix, spring onion (green onions would have been too), mint, shredded carrot, and a sliced chile.

We would have used leftover tofu from the night before, except Ernest bogarted the entire batch after it had been passed around the table but once. It was very bad form, and he was chided for his poor manners, but we all couldn’t help but find it somewhat hysterical that a 6-year-old would want to scarf down over 1/2 a pound of black pepper tofu. Since we had no leftovers, I made another batch to round out our salads. I highly recommend it – it took a grand total of 10 minutes to make.

Many of you avid readers can make these yourselves from the picture above. But if you’d like to include the black peppered and saucy tofu or want more instruction, I’ve posted this Vietnamese Spring Noodle Salad recipe over at Local Foods.

While there were no garnishes/toppings leftover, that whole new batch of tofu and new round of rice noodles meant there were plenty of both sitting in the fridge the next morning. Somewhere in there I also found a bit more mint and some escarole leaves that looked great even though I could not for the life of me remember when I bought them. Since I like to live on the edge and have failed – despite many bouts with the f***er – to develop a healthy fear of food poisoning over lo these many years of cooking, I chopped up the escarole, heated up the tofu and rice noodles, put it all in a bowl topped with mint and the drizzle of nuoc cham left, and called it lunch. Yum. It really was the meal that just kept giving.

Later on I headed to Cafe Barbette to meet a friend. As she predicted, I had “just a glass of wine” (she seems to find this high-larious). She decided to have wine too, and so ordered the same thing I did. The server left and she turned to me in a panic, “that wasn’t a $20 glass of wine you ordered, was it?”

I kind of love that she thought I’d be ordering $20 glasses of wine. It sounds very fabulous, in a way. But internets, I’m a freelance writer. No $20 glasses of anything for me. $20 bottles, sure. $20 glasses, no.

So we sat and sipped and soaked up the energy that emanates from Upper Midwesterners when they have long, warm summer nights at their disposal. It is joyous. It is contagious. It is palpable. I love it.