The Staple Store Cookbook Vol 01 | Catie Gett

These recipes have been tested in real kitchens with blunt knives, crying toddlers, and zero mental bandwidth — and they still work.

Over 200 pages, 90 recipes and more than 100 photos. Printed in Naarm by a certified carbon neutral printer, on responsibly sourced and recycled paper with vegetable-based, toxin-free inks.

I wrote this cookbook four times. Each draft, it got simpler — shorter steps, more accessible ingredients, a shrinking equipment list. By the final version, I had a book of recipes that actually work: not curated to impress, not pretending to be more than they are. Because that's how real people cook — with kids hanging off them, on tight budgets, with bandwidth that can't stretch to complicated meals that fall flat.

I'm a naturopath with 15 years of practice, from a food family, with years of professional kitchen experience behind me. For over a decade I ran The Staple Store — a health food shop that became a little institution built on minimal waste, whole food, and good people. When the cost-of-living crisis hit, instead of holding onto our commercial recipes, I started giving them away. The response told me everything.

People were hungry for Good, Simple, Clever.

Good — whole-food, naturopathically designed around ingredients anyone can find and afford.

Simple — recipes that forgive mistakes and flex around what's actually in your fridge.

Clever — commercially tested, stress-tested in thousands of homes, and built to always work.

STAPLE VOL 01 brings together the most celebrated recipes from The Staple Store archives alongside real-life health food hacks from this tired mama's kitchen to yours.

These aren't "perfect" recipes. They're lived-in ones — cooked by people who love food and people who don't, by families on tight budgets, in kitchens with dodgy ovens and noisy cognitive loads. They work because they've been tested in the wild.

This cookbook is my love letter to food that nourishes without fuss. Health food that's just good food. Forgiving. Almost impossible to f*** up.