Cooking is a little easier, but only a little

I've been holding off on leveling up my cooking until 3.1 in the hopes that the tweaks Blizzard was making would give me an easier go of it, but I probably shouldn't have bothered waiting. While they have given us a few more recipes that stay green later, that's pretty much all we got. Anyone expecting more yellow recipes or even (gasp) orange to get the skill points rolling faster will be sorely disappointed. I cooked some of those Salmon you see above, and got a pretty good rate of about one point for every three cooks (which is normal for green on any profession), but 420-450 is still a slightly uphill battle.

The good news is that you no longer need flint and tinder (though if, like me, you bought a Gnomish Army Knife, you didn't have to worry about that anyway), and you should make sure to stop and talk to the cooking trainer next time you run the daily, as they'll now teach you the Black Jelly recipe. And of course that ugly Chef's Hat is in the game — I considered it for a moment, but at 100 Dalaran Cooking awards, you're going to be doing at least a few weeks of grinding just to wear that hat. Still, if people will fish up the turtle mount, I guess there's no end to what they'll chase in game.

Update: We're also told the level required for the cooking dailies may have been raised to 80 — one tipster says one faction can do them and the other can't. May be a bug — we'll keep an eye out on this one.