Good-Food for Good-People

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, with a certified green carbon neutral printing company, on responsibly sourced and recycled paper and vegetable toxic-free inks.

I've written this cookbook four times. Each draft, it got simpler. The steps got shorter. The ingredients more accessible. The prep smarter. The equipment list shrank. By the final draft, I had written a book of recipes that work — not curated to impress, not pretending to be more than I am. Because that's how people cook: when they've got kids hanging off them, or they're cooking for one, or they're managing budgets and bandwidth that can't stretch to complicated meals that don't work.

I became a naturopath 15 years ago. I come from a food family, and I spent years working in kitchens before opening The Staple Store. This isn't my first rodeo — I've successfully crowdfunded and self-published four other titles, two of which went on to be published internationally and translated. So yes, I've made a million mistakes before this point, but I've also learned how to do this well.

The Staple Store was my health food shop for over a decade. It grew into a little institution: minimal waste, whole-food ideas, and good people. When the cost-of-living crisis hit, I paused the online store — and instead of holding onto our NDA-guarded commercial product recipes, like Not So Dal Lentils and DIY Cake Mixes, I started giving them away.

The response was huge. Because people were hungry for Good, Simple, Clever.

Good — whole-food, naturopathically designed around ingredients that are accessible.

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

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

That's what STAPLE VOL 01 is: a collection of the most celebrated recipes from The Staple Store archives — plus the my real-life health-food recipes and hacks from this tired mama's kitchen to yours.

These aren't "perfect" recipes. They're lived-in ones. They've been cooked by people who love to cook and people who don't, by families on tight budgets, in kitchens with dodgy ovens, busy countertops, blunt knives, 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.