Bon Appetit!

Here's where Julie & Julia and EG cross over - it's time to level my cooking skill on Diagnose.

There are three 'secondary' skills that every character can pursue in addition to their professions: First Aid, Fishing, and Cooking. My First Aid level is high enough to be making heavy netherweave bandages at this point, so there's no rush on that. I've been leveling it regularly as I went along because as a rogue the bandages come in pretty handy. I can't quite ambush and eviscerate mobs to death, so they get in a few shots on me and after a few mobs (or a bad pull) I tend to need a bandage.

I'm in no hurry to level fishing, but as it turns out, fishing is an excellent companion skill to cooking. You can level quite a long way from cooking the fish you catch and you can almost do without animal meat altogether. That brings up an interesting thought... I bet I could get away with role-playing a vegetarian character. I'll save that thought for later.

So right now I'm somewhere around 230 cooking I think, the most difficult recipe I can make is the Monster Omelet and that turns green at 262. After that I'll need new recipes to level from. If I don't level up my fishing, the easiest way to get from 262 to 300 is by cooking the Juicy Bear Burger (turns yellow at 285) and Smoked Desert Dumplings. So my to-do list looks like this:

• Head to Winterspring and farm giant eggs off the owlkin until my cooking hits 262
• Travel to Felwood to get the Bear Burger recipe and kill bears until my cooking gets to 285
• Travel all the way to Silithus to get the Dumpling recipe - quest reward - and then farm up the worms until I hit 300.

And that should catch me up to outland on all my skills - except fishing.