The James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street delivers 200 easy, clever recipes you can just cook: the world’s greatest culinary ideas, distilled to their essence and simplified for weeknight meals.

Milk Street has spent years learning from cooks all around the world and applying those lessons to weeknight cooking here at home. This book takes the best of those great culinary ideas and pares them back to their most basic, essential elements. The result is a set of recipes that are genius in their simplicity.

Each of these 200 recipes works with just a handful of ingredients and short active cooking time; these dishes are done when you need them, or hands-off so you can let them cook while you do something else. The keys are high-impact ingredients, transformative techniques, powerful flavour combinations, and layers of texture. Milk Street Simple recipes help turn a straightforward bowl of pasta or a head of roasted cauliflower into a delightful meal, with no fuss and recipes that are endlessly flexible.

If you loved Milk Street’s Cookish, this collection of recipes is for you. Chapters include:

• noodles and pasta
• grains and rice bowls
• soups and stews
• easy roasts and braises
• quick broils and grilling
• traybakes (sheet pan dinners)
• vegetables and salads
• stir fries
• one-pot methods
• and even desserts you can throw together quickly for a little sweet something to close out the day.

---

Mango Salad with Toasted Coconut and Cashews 

Start to finish: 45 minutes (30 minutes active)

Servings: 4

This bright, tropical salad gets a zingy boost from red onion pickled quickly in lime juice. Combined with ripe, juicy mangoes, the result is a balanced tangle of tangy and sweet flavours, as well as contrasting soft and crisp textures. Toasted coconut and cashews contribute crunch, while mint adds cool, fresh notes. Don’t worry if the mango slices are uneven—a loose, thrown together look is part of the salad’s charm. This is great paired with grilled fish or shrimp, as well as pork or chicken.

⅓ cup unsweetened wide-flake coconut

⅓ cup roasted cashews, roughly chopped

1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced

1 teaspoon grated lime zest, plus 3 tablespoons lime juice

Kosher salt and ground black pepper

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Two 14- to 16-ounce ripe mangoes, peeled, pitted and thinly sliced

½ cup lightly packed fresh mint OR cilantro OR a combination, torn

In an 8-inch skillet over medium, toast the coconut and cashews, stirring, until golden brown and fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate and cool to room temperature. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, stir together the onion, lime zest and juice and ¼ teaspoon salt; let stand for 15 minutes.

To the onion mixture, stir in the oil and ¼ teaspoon each salt and pepper. Add the mangoes and mint, then toss. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a platter and sprinkle with the coconut and cashews.

Optional garnish: Flaky sea salt OR thinly sliced Fresno or jalapeno chilies OR both

Excerpted from MILK STREET SIMPLE by Christopher Kimball. Copyright © 2023 by CPK Media, LLC. Photograph by Erik Bernstein. Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.