Cookin'

I don't cook. I don't even like reheating. I'll make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or some mac 'n cheese out of a box if I'm desperately hungry or my monsters are chirping, but I refuse to authentically cook with, like, ingredients and stuff.

Emanee, on the other hand, is a master chef. WoW's patch 2.3 introduced some new daily quest opportunities, including a cooking quest that changes daily. I picked mana berries the other day and had to travel to Blades Edge and whip up a dish over the steaming corpse of an Abyssal I had just smote. The day after that, I flew to Nagrand, hunted some Clefthoofs and then whipped up a little dish over an open fire in the Ancestral Grounds. You get almost eight gold for the effort, plus your choice of crates full of either fish or animal meat. The past two crates have also contained recipes I didn't have, including a blue one for chocolate cake and another blue from some "shocking" steak. Hmmmm . . . cake and steak.

I like the direction Blizzard is going with this. As I mentioned in a previous post, the daily quests before 2.3 bring a whole new meaning to the term "grind," especially the Netherwing ones. Obtaining my drake nearly burnt me right out of the game. But where the Netherwing dailies are frantic and competitive, the cooking ones have been relaxed, dang near serene. I'm not sure if everyone gets different cooking quests each day, but I was the only toon picking mana berries in Netherstorm. If that had been a Netherwing quest, I would have had to elbow five other schmucks for just one node of mana-flavored spherical fruit. I did notice on the day I hunted Clefthoof's that the critters were conspicuously thinned out. But with just a bit of flying I was able to track some down easily enough.

So I hope Blizzard continues marginalizing the grind in its daily and reputation quests.