Assorted Cooked Vegetables, Hard-Boiled Eggs, and Salt Cod with Garlic Mayonnaise

• Four Ways Cook Leeks and Cardoons
• How to Make Mayonnaise and Improvise your Own Variations
• Tips for Prepare Salt Cod
• How to Make a Variety of Sauces for Vegetables

Most vegetables are adaptable to a variety of cooking methods and take well to steaming, grilling, sautéing, or boiling. However you cook them, vegetables are inevitably enhanced by sauces such as compound butters, flavored mayonnaises, emulsified egg and butter sauces such as hollandaise or béarnaise sauce, or butter sauces such as beurre blanc and its derivatives. But of all the sauces served with vegetables, garlic mayonnaise, sauce aïoli, is the most famous and is the focal point of the Provençal grand aïoli, a traditional festival at which heaping platters of hot vegetables and other goodies such as poached salt cod and hard-boiled eggs are passed along with a big bowl or mortar full of aïoli for dolloping in obscene quantities on all of the above.