The Best Simple Recipes

The Best Simple Recipes offers more than 200 full-flavored easy-to-prepare recipes that can be on the table in 30 minutes or less. Just because you’ve got a half-hour or less to make dinner on some weeknights, that doesn't mean you have to settle for a can of soup or a sandwich or toss together a boring and flavorless fast recipe (which often aren't even as fast as they promise).

Our test cooks have created more than 200 recipes that keep the ingredients and cooking time to a minimum and offer tons of flavor and plenty of variety. While some dinners are naturally pretty fast—like chicken cutlets, pasta, and burgers—we made sure to make every minute count by combining steps, making pans pull double duty, and finding shortcuts wherever we could. But we really put our test kitchen know-how to the test by foolproofing recipes that normally require long stays in the oven or hours on the stove. You can make traditionally long-cooking meals work in 30 minutes—from Skillet Greek Lasagna to a Quick Beef Carbonnade—without sacrificing flavor.

The expertise and knowledge of America's Test Kitchen comes through in sidebars and features scattered throughout the book. "Quick Prep Tips" show in one or two steps how to get your ingredients ready fast. "Smart Shopping" boxes share valuable information we have garnered through 20+ years of taste tests. “Simple Sides” recipes throughout the book complete the meal. The Best Simple Recipes is built to satisfy busy, hungry, and finicky eaters--which qualifies as all of us at least some of the time.