Adaptogens: 75+ Herbal Recipes and Elixirs to Improve Your Skin, Mood, Energy, Focus, and More

Five Stars
great recipes

A good addition to a personal herbal library for intermediate herbalists
I’ve had an interest in adaptogens for a long time. Using herbal adaptogens are an easy way to incorporate more herbs into your daily healthy living habits. Adaptogens increase stamina, reduce anxiety, boost the immune system, and modulate the fight or flight response to daily stress. I appreciate the benefits that herbal adaptogens contribute to keeping our bodies functioning efficiently. I was eager to find out Noveille’s take on these herbs.Some herbal adaptogens that are covered in detail in this book:• Albizia• Ashwagandha• Astragalus• Burdock• Cordyceps• Dang Shen• Eleuthero• American Ginseng• Asian Ginseng• Gogi berries• Gotu Kola• Hawthorn• Holy Basil or Tulsi• Fo-ti• Jiaogulan• Licorice• Maca• Nettle• Reishi• Rhodiola• Schisandra berry• Shatavari• SumaWhat this book does wellThe real benefit of this book is the flexible recipes that are offered that can help you add more adaptogens into your diet. Noveille doesn’t just offer you tinctures and teas, the standard herbal remedies. In this book you’ll find recipes for cinnamon candied walnuts with eleuthero, sunflower seed butter, raspberry and rhodiola yoghurt, macha and peach chia seed pudding with jiaogulan, chili lime pistachios with dang shen, burdock skillet sauté, immune berry astragalus gummies, and many other interesting ways to add more herbal goodness to your life.The recipes really shine. Other herbal adaptogen books, like Adaptogens: Herbs for Strength, Stamina, and Stress Relief by David Winston and Steven Maimes (2007) focus on the technical information about herbal adaptogens with information about dosage and standard herbal preparations. There is little in the way of suggestions for incorporating these beneficial herbs into a daily healthy living practice.Adaptogens, 75+ Herbal Recipes and Elixirs offers practical ways to consume these beneficial herbs, in ways that won’t disrupt your already busy lifestyle. You won’t need to wait weeks for an adaptogen tincture to be ready to use. Noveille offers ways to utilize the herbs today. Some are as easy as adding two or three adaptogens in powdered form to recipes you already love, like adding maca to a fruit smoothie, or adding astragalus and mushrooms to miso soup. Once you start using the recipes in this book, you’ll find it easy to adapt many of the recipes you already make regularly to include more adaptogens.Where the book lacks substanceThere are no photos, not even black and white photos. It’s hard to imagine what a recipe is supposed to look like if you’ve never seen anything like it. There are no serving suggestions. The recipe is there but you’ll need to have some experience serving herbal concoctions to know how best to present them to family members who may be new to herbs, in an attractive way.This is best for someone with some experience using herbs in their cooking and someone already utilizing herbal remedies. There are brief descriptions of the main adaptogens used in the book in a glossary section, but you’ll want more detail about each herb before you try to use it with other members of the family.Noveille stresses that these recipes are for adults only and not for pregnant or breast feeding mothers. That’s not to say, you can’t serve some of these herbs to your whole family, but you’ll want to do more research than this book offers.This is a small trade paperback size book. The cover is smart but it may not stand out on the shelf next to other more colourful herbal books, leading you to overlook it. That would be a shame. I think you’ll find a lot of helpful information and practical recipes that you can start to use right now. This is a good companion book to the herbal reference books you already have in your personal library.I gave it 4 stars because I think that many of the recipes needed pictures to break up the text and make it more enticing. I wouldn’t purchase this as a gift book for someone that wasn’t already intensely interested in herbs. But I would purchase it for an herbalist friend who is already sold on the value of herbs for health and wellness. This book is a good addition to a personal herbal library for those at an intermediate level in herbal studies.I received a review copy of this book directly from the publisher. This represents my honest appraisal of the work.

Lack of photos makes it my least favorite adaptogen book
Unfortunately the author doesn’t have any photos so I I find myself going towards other books that I have on adaptogens.

Informative read.