Joy Bauer’s 'Superfood! 150 Recipes for Eternal Youth'

This week Andria Frankfort, Back Porch Table columnist, and I are joining together for another cookbook and recipe test combination. This week we chose Joy Bauer’s Superfood! 150 Recipes for Eternal Youth, which focuses on superfoods that provide benefits for the human body including easing aches and pains and reducing the incidents of certain cancers and heart disease.

I do not watch a lot of television and rarely watch it in the morning so I was not familiar with Joy Bauer. The introduction for this cookbook is shorter than most current cookbooks and did not include any information on who she is so I located her bio on the back cover and learned that she is the Today Show nutritionist. She is also the official nutritionist for the New York City Ballet and has written a number of bestselling books.

In the Introduction, Bauer outlines the eight categories she uses for superfoods: “vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts and seeds, coffee and tea, whole grains, and scrumptious extras (like cocoa powder and extra virgin olive oil). Within each category, I’ve identified true standouts that you’ll definitely want to toss into your grocery cart.” She incorporates these superfoods into her recipes with the goal of living healthier. As the Introduction wraps up, she states “[i]magine living to be one hundred – looking and feeling amazing - all while chowing down on insanely delicious food. It’s entirely possible. Get set, get cooking!”

While I have no interest in living until I am one hundred years old, the recipes in this cookbook do look delicious, and as I flipped through for my initial preview, I flagged numerous recipes that look quite yummy. The following ones will be my top choices to try out: Breakfast Coffee Cookies (she debuted this recipe on the Today Show), Loaded Bell Pepper Nachos, Roasted Pepitas (either Cinnamon-Sugar or Cumin-Cayenne), Roast Beef Tenderloin with White Wine Mushroom Sauce, and Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes (either Savory, Sweet, or Spicy). In several of her recipes, she provides the basic dish (such as the sweet potatoes) and then provides two or three different ways that the item can be prepared based on what else is being served or on a person’s taste. I think is a clever and helpful idea and look forward to experimenting with the various flavors.

The cookbook is divided into 11 sections including Morning Meals; Soups and Salads; Superfood Fries (yes, an entire section on fries!); Sweet and Savory Treats; Smoothies, Slushies, Beneficial Bevvies and Grown-Up Cocktails; and several more. The recipes vary a fair amount in difficulty level and number of ingredients. She provides in-depth descriptions about recipe preparation and where to find less-well-known ingredients, which I found helpful.

The photographs accompanying the recipes are fabulous and will persuade readers to make the various dishes Bauer includes in her new cookbook. I plan to start working my way through the recipes from Joy Bauer’s Superfood! 150 Recipes for Eternal Youth this week. (Stay tuned for a future Back Porch Table article highlighting a recipe from this cookbook.) 

I received this cookbook through my participation in the ABRAMS Dinner Party, a genius promotion strategy created by the publisher where they send out cookbooks to influencers and ask for their thoughts on these books.

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