salted water, then tossed in a skillet with some butter, or green beans that are blanched until almost completely soft before being stirred into a creamy mushroom sauce and baked in a casserole It’s a softening step for vegetables, allowing you better control over the texture of the finished dish, rather than trying to cook all the ingredients in one step or one pot It’s also a valuable organizational and timesaving tool for dinner parties or holidays Remember this: anytime blanching a vegetable is part of a recipe, you can always cool that vegetable, dry it carefully, and finish the rest of the recipe later This means that a recipe for, say, a broccoli or cauliflower gratin that calls for blanching the stalks, then covering them with a cheese sauce and baking can actually be broken down into two distinct steps that don’t have to be done with one immediately following the other Heck, you could boil your broccoli on Monday, then toss it with your cheese sauce and bake it on Thursday if you’d like This kind of flexibility in a recipe makes planning and executing far simpler I’ve included steaming in this section as well, since it essentially accomplishes the same goal as blanching BUTTERED SNAP PEAS Here is blanching at its absolute simplest You boil your snap peas just until barely tender, then add them to a buttery sauce (or just butter and lemon juice) you have waiting in a skillet Toss to combine over high heat, and serve Of course, as I mentioned above, you can blanch the peas ahead of time, cool them down, and serve them whenever you’d like by preparing the sauce, adding the peas straight from the fridge, and tossing until heated through Want to make the recipe even easier? Skip the snap peas and use regular old frozen green peas Because freezing vegetables disrupts their cell structure in much the same way that blanching does, if you use frozen peas, there’s no need to even boil them beforehand Simply thaw them under running water, drain, and add them to the buttery sauce in the skillet PICKING PEAS ...you’d like by preparing the sauce, adding the peas straight from the fridge, and tossing until heated through Want to make the recipe even easier? Skip the snap peas and use regular old... vegetables disrupts their cell structure in much the same way that blanching does, if you use frozen peas, there’s no need to even boil them beforehand Simply thaw them under running water, drain, and add them... even boil them beforehand Simply thaw them under running water, drain, and add them to the buttery sauce in the skillet PICKING PEAS