How do I use the cooking set???

[Secret Foxfire]

I have two quests that require me to use the cooking set. Both NPCs said they would "give me the recipe" but the quest description just has a list of ingredients. I finally got the cooking set unlocked and I can't figure out how to use it. When I approach it, the prompts say [LB] cook from recipe and [LT] pick up. If I press the left bumper, it opens a recipe book with three recipes in it (ones that Django has taught me). Left trigger just picks it up to move it. I've tried just pressing A like I do to interact with other machines and nothing happens.

I do not see ANY way to just cook without using a recipe. Elsewhere I'm finding instructions about having a time limit to put ingredients in the pot and such and.... i do NOT see how to do that. Is this a bug with the gamepad controls or something? What am I missing??? This is far from the first time the in-game instructions have made no sense whatsoever and I'm getting extremely frustrated. Thank you in advance for any help.

[TwinCats]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wExAjSozh1Y

[Secret Foxfire]

First of all, thank you for the response. I'm not sure I fully understand what on earth is happening there though. After watching for a few minutes it appears that you have the items on your hotbar and while looking at the pot, you use the action key (A for me, I would expect) to add the ingredients directly?

Again, thank you for the information. I will try it when my frustration with the insanity of this game's design has cooled enough to try again.

Secondly, WHAT THE HELL???????? How on EARTH is anyone expected to know how to do that? I have a whole field full of machines and NOT ONE OF THEM requires you to stand in front of it and add ingredients without opening some kind of internal menu. Every. Other. Machine has the SAME interface: press A to open and select the thing you want. There are NO INSTRUCTIONS for the cooking pot anywhere that I can see. How does ANYONE figure out how to do this????? This is the most unintuitive nonsense I've ever seen in my life. I am astounded that more people aren't put off by this game's nonsensical design choices. The setting is cool, the graphics are cute, but the game is a mess of bugs, loading times, poor performance, confusion, and frustration when I inevitably lose another day's worth of progress because the game randomly crashes or unexpectedly drops me in a dungeon I'm not allowed to leave when I have no stamina left to fight with (and gives me no way to regain it). At this point I've decided to just use cheat mods to give myself infinite everything so I can plow through the rest of the story and uninstall this. Massively regret purchasing this game and I will never understand why it is so popular with so many people.

I've been playing games daily for thirty years, from NES and DOS through today, and I can't remember ever being this consistently flummoxed by a game's design and completely at a loss for what I have to do since my very first playthrough of the original Myst.

And again, thank you for your assistance (though a simple "hold the ingredient on the hotbar, stand in front of the pot, and click / press A to add the ingredients" would have sufficed rather than presenting me with a video to sift through for the info I needed). My frustration is directed at the game and not the messenger for this bewildering information.

[JVC]

The cooking set is a bit weird, but you might find the wiki's list of recipes useful.

https://mytimeatportia.fandom.com/wiki/Cooking_Set

When a recipe says add 2x of the same item, don't add them right after the other, instead go for A - B - A. The reason is that if the previous animation hasn't stopped completely, there is a risk that the character eats the ingredient instead of adding it to the set. I have only seen that bug appear if you add identical ingredients right after each other.

[Kargor]

It's just one of the things where they tried to make things different. but...

I can kind of see getting recipes from sources other than the machine itself, and it would probably work if they hadn't decided to leave the "ingredient categories" undocumented. Like what exactly does the game consider to be a "seasoning", and what are the exact rules for a "any ingredient" (which, other than one might expect, isn't always just 'any').

So, like with many things... take a look at the wiki before doing anything.