The best recipe guide (organization wise) I've found - these are still using the translations from black desert tome so some of the names are slightly different in game but they are easy to figure out IMO. Recipes are on the 'recipe' tab, ignore the prices because that isn't accurate. Protein tab shows what falls into each meat category, and I find the tips are solid.
As someone who has spent a significant amount of time cooking and slightly less gardening I would add the following substitutions as well: You can sub both green and blue garden items. Green items = 3 white. Blue items = 5 white. I have found however it is highly profitable to use a crop workbench to bundle up your blue items so I prefer that instead. 10 blue say pumpkins + 1 black stone powder gives a trade pack I sell for about 18kish depending on distance and you can carry quite a few since they aren't as heavy as regular trade items.
Leveling wise you get the most experience if you are doing something tier appropriate, so beer or one of the 30 min buffs until green level, then one of the 60 minute buffs/pet food/oatmeal or tea with fine scent(ingredient in both milk tea XP buff and Sute tea life XP buff) to Skilled, and teas (or other 90 minute foods) at skilled. There are 4 dailies in Velia at the inn for cooking once you finish David Finto's quest his female helper will give them to you. The last of these 4 requires skilled 5 to complete. They do require fishing and meat products for these but they give a boatload of cooking xp. I prefer to make the teas because their buffs are awesome and the mats require the least amount of processing/gathering energy spent.
If you want to build teas then you need the honey node by Heidel, an alt that can milk each day, a grain node like potatoes for the flour, and a garden with strawberries and sunflowers. The other flowers in game apparently can't be farmed. I prefer strawberries because they take 1 garden slot while grapes take 2. I try to keep my seeds at the green tier because then I can use 1 flower and 1 fruit to make each tea with fine scent.
Always have at least 7 slots open in your inventory when cooking - there are 5 special proc dishes you turn in for money, milk, beer, cooking xp, and CP plus each cooking attempt can proc a special dish depending on your level and maybe your luck. So beer making can proc the dishes plus the blue beer which restores more worker stamina. Turn in these for good stuff.
You can have as many gardens as you are willing to spend contribution points - the only requirement is that you place the one in your inventory before you go back to the vendor and get another one. The largest garden in game comes from the tool vendor in Heidel and is 10 slots. Having water and fertilizer is helpful - I haven't placed any water features or scarecrows as these eat garden space and I don't have absurd amounts of CP to get many gardens. Water you get with the little bottles at the river and then either sifting or heating will give you better water - both give your garden the same amount of improvement so the choice is yours. I generally heat the water because the heated (distilled) water is used in making better fertilizer. If you do alchemy you may want to sift instead.
Fertilizers:
first quality doesn't add much and takes many to fill the fertilizer bar - Inorganic - dry 5 starch (potato etc)
fertilizer byproduct - take 3 inorganic and 2 leavening agent (can we just say yeast please?) and shake - adds about 1/4 to 1/3 of the fertilizer bar
organic fertilizer - take 1 fertilizer byproduct and 2 distilled (heated) water and shake them to make (edit: this fills the bar about half way)
PROTIP: All food has a cooldown of 30 minutes to use. You can obtain multiple buffs by eating different long duration foods after that cooldown is up. Food buffs do not overwrite each other.
My biggest goal at the moment besides obtaining more CP for more gardens is to get out to the islands and unlock fishing and seafood nodes - this will make producing organic pet food easy as the workers will worry about getting all the fish. I anticipate needing to use some alt's energy for fish/seafood drying. In addition it helps with completing the daily cooking quests.
