For quick vegetables that sing, cook them simply — and then slather them in sauce
Apologies to the Beatles, but in the kitchen, all you need is sauce. Vinaigrettes for your salads, creamy purees for your grain bowls, salsas for dipping, glazes for coating. I mean, if you think about it, what is soup, if not a big bowl of sauce? With perhaps some chunks of vegetables and/or proteins swimming in it.
Perhaps that last example goes a little far, but you get my point. When I'm in the mood to make something particularly quick and straightforward, but I need to add complexity of flavor, I turn to a sauce.
Bonus points when the sauce takes hardly any time to put together. That's certainly the case with one from Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi's new book, “Around the World in 120 Salads” (Kyle Books, 2017). They got the recipe for Vegetables a la Grecque from chef Alain Roux of the three-star Waterside Inn in Berkshire, England. It's a breeze to make, and once the sauce is ready, the rest of the recipe is flexible.
The flexible part is the selection of vegetables. Roux suggests babies, and if you can get them, absolutely do. Tiny zucchini and carrots, super-thin French beans, little radishes: They're perfect here. But so is cauliflower, with the florets broken up particularly small, and you can similarly cut other bigger vegetables down to size. The important thing is to choose the freshest specimens you can find, and then to blanch them in boiling water until they're just tender.
The sauce (or dressing, as the authors refer to it), is a simply simmered blend of aromatics and spices, vinegar, oil, water, tomato paste, lemon juice and sugar. I realize that the demonization of sugar in nutrition circles might make its addition a tough sell to some, but it's a small amount for four to six servings, and the sugar balances the sauce into something truly sublime that coats those vegetables. Trust me: You'll want bread for sopping.