Early spring is all about timing.
One week the weather is heavy, the sky bleak, the produce aisles bland and exhausted, with rows of vegetables that have spent more time in the back of a cross-country truck than anywhere near the dirt they came from.
But then, suddenly, there's fresh growth in the grocery stores and newly opened farmers markets: locally grown, sometimes still earth-clad, baby carrots and thin asparagus, morels and artichokes and, if you're lucky, fiddleheads.
And how you deal with these sudden epiphanies is just as much about timing as the produce itself.
After months of slow braises and winter stews, it's time to switch gears and use cooking methods that match the vegetables, bringing out their subtle tastes and ephemeral qualities.
So turn off the oven and throw open your windows - or at least think about it - and get out your blanching pot and saute pans.
Because what spring vegetables want is a fast saute, a quick dip in boiling water, a soft wilt in a pan: methodologies that play to their tenderness and their light beauty.
You also want a kind of celebration. It's spring, finally, and you want to highlight the green crunch of your bounty, not bury it under the sedimentary weight of a casserole.
But it's not summer yet, a season when much of the produce is best eaten raw, seasoned only with a little olive oil and sea salt.
Spring vegetables, over-wintered, just transplanted, or only now emerging from the winter forest floors, often need a little tempering, a slight exposure to the heat that the sun has yet to give up. The trick is to know how much heat to give them in order to preserve their essential qualities - and, more specifically, what kind of heat.
Blanching, also sometimes called par-boiling, is a technique that is tremendously suited to many spring vegetables. By plunging delicate vegetables into a vigorously boiling - and heavily salted - large pot of water, cooking them only for a few minutes, and then halting the cooking process quickly in ice water, you manage to bridge the delicate gap between the raw and the cooked.
The very high temperature of the water, made higher by the salt content, kind of flash-cooks the produce; the ice water bath prevents carry-over cooking and ensures that the vegetables retain some crispness - as well as their color, which is, in fact, heightened by the whole process.
