The cooking in Stardew Valley isn’t entirely conducive to really stretching your culinary skills. This mod aims to fix that, giving you more options and features in the kitchen, and adding a little depth to way the farming game uses food.
In The Love of Cooking, you get a revamped cookbook, more opportunities for progression and friendships, extra ingredients, and the power to burn your meals or create leftovers. In creator Blueberry’s cooking menu, you can search for foods using a number of criteria, including filtering out what you currently can’t make, and you can craft up to nine recipes at a time.
The Community Centre has an extra challenge, requiring you to fetch food for the resident forest spirits to upgrade the kitchen there. Onions, cabbages, and carrots are among the new crops, and oils are no longer an ingredient, but a way to upgrade the quality of the meals you make. Cooking has another specific layer of progression, with rewards that unlock the more you cook, and you can use other people’s kitchens, to entice you to be a little more sociable.
Food heals over time, as well, to add an element of pacing to your meals throughout the day. This, and all other features, are optional, and can be switched on-and-off, depending. Do make sure to triple-check food burning is turned off, should you not want to indulge in that kind of masochism.
In addition to the Nexus link above, Blueberry provides a source on GitHub. We’ve a list of the best Stardew Valley mods otherwise, to customise your experience further. As always, mod with caution.