Cooking the first green things

After a South Dakota winter, the first green vegetables feel like a reward. Then most of them get cooked until they're olive-colored and soft, because that's how a lot of us grew up eating them. Spring vegetables deserve better, and the fix is simpler than you'd think.

Fast, salty, and stopped

Restaurants cook most green vegetables the same way: a big pot of well-salted water at a hard boil, a short cook, and an ice bath. It's called blanching and shocking, and it's the reason a plate of restaurant asparagus is bright green with a little snap.

• A big pot. The more water, the less the boil drops when the vegetables go in. A boil that stops is a vegetable that stews.
• A lot of salt. More than you'd use for pasta. The vegetables are only in the water a minute or two, so it has to season them fast.
• A short cook. Asparagus takes 2 to 3 minutes depending on thickness. Frozen peas take about a minute. Taste one; that's the only real timer.
• An ice bath, ready before you start. Green vegetables keep cooking from their own heat. Ninety seconds on a plate is the difference between bright and drab.

Then make them rich

Blanched vegetables are a starting point, not a finished dish. Right before serving, warm them through in a pan with something rich, like brown butter, good olive oil, or a spoonful of cream. Then add something sharp: lemon zest and juice, a few drops of vinegar, a handful of soft herbs. Rich and bright together is what makes a vegetable side taste like it came from a restaurant.

Rich and bright, together. That's the whole formula for a vegetable side.

The make-ahead advantage

Here's the part that makes this a weeknight technique, not a restaurant one: you can blanch and shock vegetables hours ahead, dry them, and keep them in the fridge. At dinner, they need one minute in a hot pan. It's how a restaurant puts a perfect side of asparagus on four hundred plates a night, and how you can put it on four.

A word about timing in Sioux Falls

Local asparagus doesn't show up here until late spring. Early in the season, the asparagus and peas at the store come from farther south, and frozen peas are often sweeter than fresh ones that have traveled. Use them without guilt. When the local spears do arrive at the farmers market, cook them the same way, just for a little less time.

The April 5 class is all about this: asparagus, peas, and brown butter, and how to make spring vegetables taste like themselves.