America’s Test Kitchen has always focused on giving you the best recipe, period. For this collection, we took that mission one step further: We set out to give you the best dinner recipes that keep ingredients and time to a minimum. To us, simplicity and flavor should be anything but mutually exclusive, but most “quick” recipes cut so many ingredients that they fall seriously short on flavor, take longer than promised, or rely on gimmicks that don’t work. Time may be short, but you shouldn’t have to make compromises. With years of experience and thousands of recipe tests behind us, our team has developed more than 200 foolproof recipes, from main-course salads to family-pleasing casseroles to elegant entrées, that can be on the table in 30 minutes or less—and every single dish delivers on flavor.
Finding ingredients to pull double duty was one key to our success. For our Crispy Cajun Chicken with Bell Pepper Slaw, mayonnaise serves as the base for our slaw’s dressing and also acts as the chicken’s “base coat,” ensuring the bread-crumb coating stays put. Our Beef Tenderloin with Horseradish Mashed Potatoes is worthy of your best company, but you won’t spend all your time in the kitchen getting it ready. The secret is a quick sour-cream-and-chive horseradish sauce that enriches the potatoes and also serves as a tableside sauce.
What about equipment? While we’d never trust a microwave to cook a chicken breast, it is perfect for quickly parcooking vegetables like the broccoli in our Broccoli Pad Thai and potatoes for our Glazed Pork Chops with Sweet Potato Hash. In both cases we finish cooking the vegetables in the skillet, ensuring flavor and texture are at their best. We also streamlined cookware. For our Skillet Pastitsio, we cook meat, pasta, and sauce together in the same skillet. No fussy sauce, no multiple pots.
Finding the best shortcuts also means learning which convenience products are worth using, and we share our discoveries in “Smart Shopping” sidebars. Premade pizza dough worked well in several recipes, but we found it’s best purchased from a pizzeria, not a supermarket. To get our Quick Turkey Enchiladas on the table in half an hour, we had great success bolstering the flavor of canned enchilada sauce with cilantro, pickled jalapeños, and Monterey Jack cheese.
To round out those recipes that aren’t complete meals, we’ve also included more than three dozen “Simple Sides” that go beyond the typical. With options like Creamy Orzo and Broiled Asparagus with Balsamic Glaze, you’ll never go back to the usual suspects.
It’s time to liven up weeknight cooking with a collection of no-fail, full-flavored, quick recipes. The Best Simple Recipes will show you how.
