I have been playing with sauces lately. Mostly because it is spring, and I am moving from deep, dark braises into lighter dishes, and I happen to like green, herby sauces. They excite me for some reason, even more than red sauces do. Long before I became a cook I was fixated on the color of springtime: That youthful, sexy, verdant hue makes me feel randier just looking at it.

Cooks use green sauces most often to sex up otherwise bland meats or lighten up heavier ones. Think of a roast sauced with heavily reduced ragu. Now think of that roast with a green sauce that has just a hint of mustard or horseradish, as I did with that pigeon last week, and it is an entirely different dish.

This week I decided to play with a green sauce I’d devised after reading about a similar one in Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook. It is a parsley sauce, and it is pure cholorophyll, baby! And the addition of stock, butter, and a heaping helping of garlic chives makes it zingier than Keller’s version.

It went perfectly with a pan-roasted pheasant breast we had lying around in the freezer. I say lying around because pheasant is pretty boring; it’s a glorified chicken, after all, and chicken breasts are not typically my idea of good eats.

But roasted to a blush of pink on the inside, with crispy skin and this green sauce, I’d say it wasn’t half bad. In fact, I think I need to shoot a bunch more pheasants next season…

The other sauce I designed this week was an experiment: A chestnut cream sauce. I wanted something rich to go with a lean piece of eye round of venison I had thawed out, and this hit the trick.

I’d seen versions of this sauce done sweet, so I just switched to savory and added dill — an herb I rarely use, by the way — and it turned out well. Rich with cream. smooth from the chestnuts and springy with the dill. Greeks use dill with lamb, so I reckoned it’d go fine with venison. It did.