Vegetables – Blanching time for different vegetables

Lately, I've been direct grilling them fully stripped of the husk, with a brush of olive oil first. Its relatively quick, but requires a bit of attention as you'll need to turn the ears. You don't want the heat too high and it can be difficult not to dry the corn out.

It produces a distinct favor but its absolutely wonderful, everybody raves. The slight smokiness and carmelization of the sugar in the corn heightens its favor considerably. It produces a much different result than grilled corn wrapped in foil (which is essentially steaming the corn) or boiled corn. Grilling in the husk is another common way, but its a much different result and not too different from grilling it with foil.

It was brought up in the comments, but the most 'modern' correlation to boiling the corn like you said, would be to sous vide it. It's definitely 'modern', but sous vide is not quick. It does preserve and intensify flavour well though.

I would suggest zucchinis. They taste very good with olive oil and they will be ready at the same time as the asparagus.