Cooking meals is an activity that can benefit both yourself and your relationships with the villagers of Mineral Town. You can eat cooked meals to restore your stamina and fatigue when eaten, or given away as gifts to raise your love points and friendship points with other people. Cooked recipes can also be sold to Huang at his shop.

There are 120 recipes to collect. The recipe book is divided into 5 pages of 21 recipes each:

• Cooking Recipes

To begin cooking you'll need to upgrade your house. Gotts offers the first house remodeling option for 150 Lumber, 50 Stone, and 3000 G. He'll take 3 days to upgrade your house to medium size. The house remodel will include the kitchen area and two cooking recipes: Sashimi and Zaru Soba.

Unfortunately you can't create those meals until you also have the appropriate cooking utensils. These are sold at Jeff's grocery store, and he'll send you a mailbox letter when a cooking utensil becomes available at his general goods store:

• Seasoning Set (2500 G): The day the medium house upgrade is complete
• Cooking Pot (1000 G): 10 days after the Seasoning Set goes on sale
• Frying Pan (1200 G): 10 days after the Cooking Pot goes on sale
• Knife (1500 G): 10 days after the Frying Pan goes on sale
• Oven (2500 G): 10 days after the Knife goes on sale
• Rolling Pin (750 G): 10 day after the Oven goes on sale
• Mixer (1200 G): 10 days after the Rolling Pin goes on sale
• Whisk (500 G): 10 days after the Mixer goes on sale

You can also purchase a Refrigerator from Gotts (2500 G) to store your meal ingredients. A Large Refrigerator (5000 G) becomes available for purchase after you upgrade your house to the Large size and you have owned the normal Refrigerator for at least 3 days.

The cooking utensils will become available in sequential order (e.g., the Frying Pan will appear in Jeff's store even if you haven't bought the Cooking Pot yet.) Because the Switch version of Friends of Mineral Town does not have a TV Shopping channel, there's no chance to accidentally miss a cooking utensil when it becomes available to buy. The downside is that you can't skip to a specific utensil in the list.

How to Learn Recipes

Friends of Mineral Town does not permit experimental cooking like in the GBA game, where you could combine a random assortment of ingredients and hope it doesn't result in a burnt dish; in fact, you can't even make a failed dish in this version of the series. You must know the recipe to cook the meal. There are a total of 120 cooking recipes to collect. Also, you do NOT need to own the kitchen to learn recipes! Any recipe you learn before your kitchen is installed will still be saved to your cookbook.

Recipes can be learned by

• Giving gifts to villagers. There are 15 recipes you will receive from befriending villagers. Once you have reached 4 friendship notes (100 FP) with a villager, give them a gift that they like and in exchange they'll teach you a kitchen recipe.
• Watching TV. The 12-episode Tasty Time tv show will broadcast every Tuesday on the entertainment channel of your television set. Sometimes you'll learn one recipe, and sometimes you'll learn two. There is also one recipe from the New Years special that airs on Spring 5 of your second year (or later). There are 16 recipes that air on broadcast TV.
• Anna's Dessert Class. As you raise your friendship with Anna, you can trigger a random event where she teaches you and Manna how to cook some tasty desserts. There are 5 recipes you can learn from her Saturday-afternoon class.
• Lou's Recipe Collection. The innkeeper from Forget-Me-Not Valley will visit the second floor of the inn on Sundays. If you have certain recipes in your kitchen cookbook, Lou will teach you some classic dishes from her hometown. Lou has 10 recipes to teach you. (See more details about Lou later on this page)
• Mystery Sources. There are 2 cooking recipes you can pick up from some unusual places. The Tomatosetta Stone located on the 255th level of the Spring Mine holds the formula for making Ketchup. The Bottled Message you can catch while fishing at the Ocean during Spring hold the knowledge of cooking French Fries.
• By Inspiration. The majority of the cooking recipes will come to you by inspiration that strikes after cooking meals. As you use ingredients, you'll learn more recipes that use said ingredients. For example, you'll learn the recipe for Pineapple Juice after you cook 5 dishes that require Pineapple as an ingredient. It can be the same dish 5 times, or a variety of dishes that use Pineapple.

Some recipes have more than one way that you can learn them. For example, Raisin Bread can be picked up by either watching the Tasty Time tv show or by being inspired after cooking with Wild Grapes five times.

For inspiration triggers that require you to cook using other cooked meals as ingredients, simply cooking the recipe ingredients does NOT unlock the inspiration. For example, one of the ingredients to trigger the inspiration for Mixed Smoothie is 5 Fruit Juice. Cooking 5 Fruit Juice won't trigger the Mixed Smoothie to unlock; you need to cook a recipe that uses Fruit Juice as an ingredient such as Mixed Juice (Fruit Juice + Veggie Juice + Mixer).

Cooking Meals

To cook a meal, walk up to the kitchen and press the A button. Pick the recipe from the kitchen cookbook to see the ingredients you need to have either in your rucksack or inside the refrigerator to successfully cook the dish. If you have all necessary ingredients, then you now have two more options: 1) the quality level of ingredients (star rank and animal product level) and 2) the number of dishes you want cooked up. Press the Y Button to prioritize between using lower-quality ingredients an higher-quality ingredients, and press up or down on the left stick to select the quantity. You can cook up to 9 of the selected dish. Then press the A button to confirm.

You cannot manually select the ingredients to use in your recipes. Your only option is the Y Button to swap between normal and high-quality ingredients. For example, if you have 2 Regular Eggs, 25 Good Eggs, and 4 Golden Eggs in your refrigerator, and you want to cook the Boiled Egg recipe, the kitchen will cook the dish with either a Regular Egg (normal) or a Golden Egg (high quality). There's no way to choose to use Good Eggs when there are lower and higher quality options. The kitchen will take ingredients from the refrigerator or your rucksack, so trying to hide the Golden Eggs in the rucksack won't force the kitchen use the Good Eggs. The kitchen sees through gift wrap and will use packaged ingredients too.

An ingredient's quality can benefit the discovery of inspired recipes. Each quality rank on the ingredient will decrease the amount of ingredients you need to cook to learn a recipe by 1. For example, Miso Soup can be discovered after cooking 5 meals that use Medium Fish and 10 meals that use Onion. If you cook meals using an Onion with 2 stars of Star Rank, then you only need to cook 5 meals to meet the requirement to unlock Miso Soup; using 2 Onions with 5 stars means you only need to cook 2 meals (5 stars x 2 meals = 10). Since Medium Fish doesn't have a quality to it, you would still need to cook 5 Medium Fish.

Choosing crops with higher star ranks as ingredients won't increase the amount of money Huang offers for the cooked meal or increase the amount of the meal's stamina recovery.

Jeff's general store sells staple ingredients such as Oil, Onigiri, and so on. There are some ingredients you can find growing wild (e.g., Bamboo Shoots). A large portion of the ingredients are produced on your farm.

The Goddess' Collection

In your farmhouse bookshelf you'll find the Goddess' Collection menu. This ledger will document 108 meals that you can toss into the Harvest Goddess' pond as offerings. She will reward you with items as you fill in the shadowed entries in her collection:

• 10 cooked meals: a Moonstone
• 25 cooked meals: a Sandrose
• 50 cooked meals: a Pink Diamond
• 75 cooked meals: an Alexandrite
• 100 cooked meals: a piece of Gold Lumber
• 108 cooked meals: a Mythic Ore

While there are 120 recipes in the game, the Collection only keeps track of 108 cooked dishes. The recipes omitted from her collection are the X Egg, SUGDW Apple, HMSGB Apple, AEPFE Apple, Stamina Booster, Caffeine, Stamina Booster XL, Super Caffeine, Spring Sun, Summer Sun, Fall Sun, and Winter Sun.

You CAN toss multiple cooked dishes per day into the Harvest Goddess' pond to add their entry into the Goddess' Collection.

The collection ledger can assist those trying to marry Bon Viviant by helping to keep track of cooked meals that are then donate to the Goddess, as one of the cooking judge's requirements is to cook every recipe in the game. For everyone else, it's just a fun goal to try and complete.

Lou's Recipes

The innkeeper from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, known back then as Ruby, has 10 recipes that she can teach you. Lou will unlock after 75 offerings have been given to the Harvest Goddess. Exit your farmhouse before Noon on the first sunny-weather Sunday after throwing the appropriate number of gifts into the goddess' pond to trigger Lou's introduction. After that, Lou can be found every Sunday inside the first guestroom on the second floor of Dudley's inn.

Lou will give you one cooking recipe if you have specific cooking recipes already in your cookbook. The more you have of this specific list of recipes, the more recipes you can receive from Lou. Think of it as an equivalent exchange, in a sense; if you know three of the prerequisite recipes, Lou will teach you up to three of her recipes at one recipe per week.

The recipes you need to know so that Lou will teach you her recipes are

• Zaru Soba: Comes with the kitchen, so you know it by default. Easy peasy!
• Mixed Juice: Learn from Doctor after he has 4 friendship notes.
• Popcorn: Learn from Kai after he has 4 friendship notes.
• Tamagoyaki: Learn from Lillia after she has 4 friendship notes.
• Chocolate Cookies: Learn from Sasha after she has 4 friendship notes.
• Bamboo Rice: Learn via inspiration by cooking a recipe that uses Onigiri as an ingredient.
• Caffeine: Learn via inspiration by cooking 20 recipes that use Honey as an ingredient.
• Curry Rice: Learn via inspiration by cooking 5 recipes that use Onigiri as an ingredient.
• Mayonnaise (L): Learn via inspiration by cooking 13 recipes that use Good Egg as an ingredients. While you can make mayo using the Mayonnaise Maker machine, there is also a kitchen recipe for it. Lou wants this recipe in your cookbook.
• Miso Soup: Learn via inspiration by cooking 5 recipes that use Medium Fish and 10 recipes that use Onion.

Lou will give you these recipes based on the number of prerequisite recipes you already know. It appears for the first four recipes, you don't need to have cooked the prerequisite recipes using your kitchen, but for the higher-level recipes (like Autumn Sun), you do need to have cooked the dish. For example, I had not cooked a Caffeine yet, so Lou would not give me the Autumn Sun recipe. After I cooked a Caffeine using my kitchen, Lou finally coughed up the Autumn Sun recipe. You can cook a prerequisite recipe on Sunday and then talk to Lou.

1. Wild Grape Water
2. Vegetable Juice
3. Roasted Corn (Gray's +800 LP gift)
4. Baked Apple
5. Curry Bread
6. Relax Tea Leaves
7. Super Caffeine
8. Relax Tea
9. Spring Sun
10. Autumn Sun

Lou doesn't give any more cooking recipes after she teaches you all 10 recipes.

Villager Gifted Recipes

Not every villager has a cooking recipe they can teach after raising their friendship to 4 friendship notes, but a lot do. After you meet the minimum friendship level, giving them a gift will result in a recipe given to you in exchange. The recipes you can learn by giving gifts to the villagers are:

• Basil: Fruit Ole
• Carter: Strawberry Milk
• Cherry: Yam Dessert
• Doctor: Mixed Juice
• Dudley: Cheese Fondue
• Ellen: Sandwich
• Gotts: Okonomiyaki
• Harris: Fried Rice
• Kai: Popcorn
• Lillia: Tamagoyaki
• Manna: Mashed Potatoes
• Mugi: Ice Cream
• Saibara: Winter Sun
• Sasha: Chocolate Cookies
• Zack: Summer Sun

Selling Meals to Huang

When selling a cooked meal to Huang, the merchant will offer a price based on a range of available prices. If you don't like the price he is suggesting, you can reject his offer and talk to him again to hear a new offer price price.

Huang's offered price is random based on a defined range of values for that cooked meal. Usually this range is between the number 8 (low) and the number 7 (high). For example, if you try to sell Chocolate Cookies to Huang and his offer price is 520 G, you can safely assume that his lowest offer price will be 480 G and his highest offer price will be 570 G. No matter how often you reject his offered purchase price, Huang will not expand his offer beyond that range.

• The range will be a factor of 1 (e.g., 118 G to 127 G) for cheap and easy meals
• The range will be a factor of 10 (e.g., 480 G to 570 G) for meals that are a bit more complex
• The range will be a factor of 100 (e.g., 800 G to 1700 G) for cooked meals that are high STA recovery or have a lot of ingredients
• The range will be a factor of 1000 only for the Summer Sun and Autumn Sun cooked meals.
• The range will be a factor of 10,000 only for the Winter Sun cooked meal.

You can make a solid assumption of what you would expect his high/low prices to be after you figured out his pattern. Offer to sell him a cooked meal, see what his offer price is, reject his first offer, and then offer to sell again to see what factor his second offer changed.

Roasted Corn is the only oddball that differs from the typical 7/8 range with 173 G low/182 G high.

The cooked meals that are also normal items will not sell for more than their shipped profit amount. These are the mayonnaise recipes, the X-quality animal products, Relaxtea Leaves, and the recipes to make the three special apples Huang sells during his door-to-door salesman service. For these items, Huang will offer the same price as you would of received if the item had been sold via the standard shipping bin on your farm.

The cooking recipe pages on this guide list Huang's high/low prices.