Green Vegetables

While there are some good recipes for slow-cooked green vegetables, most of the time we want to cook them fast, so they keep their crunch, color, and freshness. Classic recipes insist on cooking green vegetables in a lot of rapidly boiling salted water. The purpose of so much water is to prevent the vegetables from cooling it down and thus slowing down the cooking. The faster the vegetables cook, the less color they lose. The salt also helps the vegetables keep their color, and it increases the temperature of the boiling water, which again shortens the cooking time. Some cooks prefer to steam green vegetables, believing that boiling leaches out nutrients, but many studies show that the loss of nutrients is about the same with both methods.