Joyous Health Cookbook Review

At the beginning of every year I tell myself "This is going to be the year when you eat healthy, exercise daily, and get yourself into amazing health!" and every year I last maybe 5 days, and then I fall into my bad habits again. This year started out much the same way. I try to eat healthy foods, but I eventually find them boring and tasteless. I try to be healthy and drink water, but it too gets boring and tasteless. It is just so much easier to give in to the temptation of having a nice juicy hamburger than to eat healthy. This changed a bit this year when I was asked to review Joyous Health by Joy McCarthy.

At first I thought this health cookbook was going to be very similar to the other health cookbooks I had, creating this dishes that looked amazing in the pages of a book, but tasted like cardboard. I flipped through the pages of the book and found some dishes that sounded good, but I was a little hesitant on making any of them. Finally, I was having a girls night and I decided I was just going to make two things out of the book and see if my friends could tell that it was healthy.

Before I get into what I made, I want to explain a little about the book. The beginning of the book talks about "the path to joyous health", how to get your "gut on track", various foods, supplements and habits that will lead to a joyous mood, the "joyous detox solutions", "superfoods and healthy lifestyle habits", and how to create a joyous kitchen. Each of these sections has various tips, tricks, and hints that help you to get to Joyous Health so that you can eat and live well without dieting. One of the tips I started to do was drinking a glass of lemon and water each morning. Joy states that doing this helps to cleanse the body and it helps to get you glowing. I've been doing this since I got the book and although I haven't noticed a significant difference, I feel good, so I am definitely going to keep doing this.

Be sure to go through the entire front section before the recipes, not only to pick up as many tips as you can, but also because there are recipes at the end of the chapters.

I really enjoyed reading Chapter 5- Superfoods and Healthy Lifestyle Habits for Joyous Health. I discussed what superfoods were and listed the top 12 superfoods. It then went into further detail about the different superfoods and how you can enjoy them. Another thing I really liked about the book were the Joyous Tips that are scattered throughout.

For girls night I needed two dishes that weren't going to be over the top to make and that were also going to be tasty. I finally settled on Beet Goat Cheese Dip and Chia Black Bean Brownies- my friends and I love goat cheese and lot chocolate, so I figured these two were good choices.

The Beet Goat Cheese Dip is made with beets, goat cheese, salt, and garlic. The actual recipe only calls for 1 clove of garlic, but my friends and I are addicted to garlic so I added in 3 cloves. The dip was so delicious. It comes with an Almond Flour Rosemary Cracker recipe, but I unfortunately didn't have time to make them. Instead I served the dip with crackers I had. If you like beets in any form you should definitely try out this recipe. The dip is creamy and is packed with flavor- you'd think that it was actually bad for you.

 

The Chia Black Bean Brownies were also really good. I didn't tell my friends that there were Black Beans in them and they ate them and really enjoyed them. I know my husband doesn't like dark chocolate so instead of using the dark chocolate chips (which are obviously healthier) I used semisweet chocolate chips instead. It turned out really well. I also goofed a little in the baking of them because we just got a new oven so I accidently turned it off when I thought I was just shutting off the timer, but it didn't affect them too badly.

 

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It gave some really good tips to leading a healthier life that aren't that hard to actually do. It also had some really tasty recipes that were easy. I am definitely looking forward to doing more cooking from this book. I highly recommend you pick up a copy yourself and give it a try!

I give this book

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