Catie Gett is a naturopath, cook, author and founder of The Staple Store. Her work champions practical, nourishing food without the pressure or perfectionism of modern wellness culture. Her new book, The Staple Store Cookbook, aims to uncomplicate health food through affordable, easy-to-understand recipes that also happen to be good for you.
Here’s Gett on how to make the most of The Staple Store Cookbook.
I wrote The Staple Store Cookbook Vol. 01 to uncomplicate healthfood. I’m a naturopath, I worked in commercial kitchens for years, and I come from a foodie family: my dad was a fine-dining chef and my mum owned a catering business when we were kids. It took almost four years to write, on and off. It started simply as a way of releasing my commercial recipes from my bricks-and-mortar wholefood store to my customers, so they could make them at home.
But in the last 12 months, following the closure of my online business, I fell below the poverty line as a single-parent household, and I began to understand how widespread food insecurity is through my work, but also as a lived experience. I rewrote the entire book in three months to make it simpler and more accessible, then crowdfunded $70,000 to shoot, design and print it in Melbourne and self-publish, and have since sold thousands of copies here and in over 20 countries overseas.
It all started when I released our most profitable recipe for free on social media and it went viral: a simple dry-store lentil dish that feeds a family of four for under $3.00. The response was huge, and what followed changed how I understood food insecurity: messages from people all over the world, in places I’d never expected, telling me that the recipe had provided relief and inspiration using staples like lentils, canned tomatoes and flour. So I kept writing. When I finally posted a recipe that was just beans and tomato pasta sauce in a saucepan and called it dinner, that was when it really landed: messages from social workers, assisted-living staff, people with chronic illness and disabilities who couldn’t stand at a stove, thanking me for giving them permission for dinner to be that simple. That was when I understood the job: make good food simple.
The main thing I learned writing it was that the wellness industry has confused the public into thinking health is expensive, or mostly out of reach, when, in reality, good, simple food can be healthfood.
Each feature recipe in The Staple Store Cookbook features a ‘hero food’. For the uninitiated, a ‘hero food’ is, in essence, the antithesis of the ‘superfood’: it’s financially accessible and available, something you can grow or pick up at the local store, and it carries phytonutrients with significant, scientifically validated health benefits. I call them the Clark Kents of our kitchens, heroes hiding in plain sight. Most are already part of people’s diets: apples, oats, cinnamon, oregano, pepper and beetroot, just to name a few, and I think that’s the best part of the book. This simple knowledge hands health sovereignty back to people, straight off their grocery list or out of their garden. I live in Brunswick, and there are literally tufts of my favourite hero food, parsley, growing through the cracks in the pavement everywhere. We’re tripping over health food and do not need another $80 gold-foiled supplement powder.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be that good food, minimally processed, is health food. You’re probably already doing a great job for your health and the health of your household. This book might just help you tweak a couple of things and introduce you to some good, simple, clever ideas you may not have considered before. The Toppers chapter is a good example of this: nutritional powerhouse combinations of nuts, seeds, grains and spices to add to your food that can level up a simple piece of avocado toast.
The first recipe to try from this book is the not so dal: one of our most popular commercial recipes, made thousands of times across hundreds of households, and about as foolproof as it gets. Just lentils, spices, tinned tomatoes and 25 minutes – even less in a rice cooker – for a nourishing meal that costs under $3.00 to serve a family of four.
If you’ve wanted to make bread but have felt intimidated, try the Magic Bread chapter. It’s a 70-cent no-knead loaf, close to my heart, based on a soda bread recipe handed down through generations on my mum’s Irish side, a long family history of feeding the community. I wanted a loaf that cost as little as possible, so I swapped the buttermilk for vinegar and water and baked it in a tin rather than the traditional shape, so it still looks like a commercial loaf. It’s forgiving, fast and a great entry point if bread-making has always felt intimidating. Once you’ve nailed the first loaf, try the apple and sultana version, then the umami bread, made famous by the Vicar of Dibley herself, Dawn French, who asked for the recipe one day and, within the hour, made it, declared it “utter yum” and shared it with her million-plus followers.
If you’re looking for a low-bandwidth family meal, check out the Hot Mess chapter. Try the san choy bau first: a simple pork dish with fresh salsa and caramelised peanuts in lettuce cups. I am half-Chinese, so this was my family’s answer to Taco Tuesday growing up.
There are also eight simple recipes that use a parboiled potato, which is reason alone to buy the book.
If you’re a seasoned cook, I’d point you to the One Bone, Three Broths chapter, specifically the triple-extraction bone broth. It’s a genuinely clever technique: instead of one long simmer, you take the same batch of bones through three separate extractions in a single day. The first round uses just water, vinegar and salt, with no vegetables, so you pull maximum nutrients from the bones before anything fibrous interferes with that extraction. It reduces down into a concentrated, almost consommé-like stock that you can freeze in cubes for instant richness in other dishes. Refill the same bones with water and vinegar again, this time with your classic aromatics – onion, carrot and celery – and you get a traditional, versatile stock. This second batch is perfect for a Bolognese or soup base. Then a third and final extraction with Asian aromatics gives you an entirely different broth again. Three distinct stocks from one batch of bones.
When you’ve finished reading The Staple Store Cookbook, I hope you’ll feel like you can see the seat I’ve set for you at the wellness table, because everyone’s welcome here, whatever your skill level, your capacity or your budget. I hope wellness stops feeling aspirational and starts feeling achievable.
The Staple Store Cookbook Vol. 01 is available online via The Staple Store and in select retailers. Follow along for more at @thestaplestore.