This post was created as part of NEXON PEAK activities.

Mabinogi Mobile has all kinds of food.
You can cook it yourself using life skills,
or eat before a fight to boost your stats.
I just have one complaint: why do I have to eat fish to get stronger?

🐟 A Game Where You Have to Eat Fish to Get Stronger

Of all the cooking ingredients in Mabinogi Mobile, fish are the biggest pain to get.
You have to catch them yourself, which takes forever,
and sometimes all you reel in is an old boot or a piece of paper. (Literal trash.)

And yet most of the go-to stat-boosting foods for combat are fish dishes.
Season 0 had mackerel and salmon steaks, plus catfish fish and chips,
while Season 1 introduced gold-and-silver spicy fish stew and trout en papillote.
Season 2 added pike-perch fillet risotto and fish quenelles in tomato cream sauce, too.

At least Season 2 gave us a meat dish, flavor-packed steak, for boosting Break,
but fish dishes still dominate, so there isn't much in the game I'd actually want to eat.
I barely eat fish in real life, and now I have to eat it in a game...

🍪 Bear Cookies I Made for My Guildmates

A while back, I got to meet up in real life with some guildmates I played Mabinogi with.
I didn't want to show up empty-handed, so I decided to bake some butter cookies as gifts.
I happened to have a bear-shaped cookie cutter, so I stamped my guildmates' usernames into the cookies.
Putting the names we used in-game on actual treats made for a pretty decent gift.

Back then, Mabinogi Mobile didn't have any cookie-related dishes,
but these days, I'd probably bake chocolate nut biscuits to bring along.

Chocolate nut biscuits are an in-game food made with hazelnuts, flour, chocolate pieces, eggs, and heavy cream.
That's part of what makes cooking in Mabinogi Mobile fun:
it calls for ingredients you'd actually use in a real kitchen.
You buy some ingredients from NPCs, while others you have to gather or process yourself.

It's pretty easy to imagine what a biscuit with hazelnuts and chocolate would taste like.
Next time I have a reason to bake cookies, it might be fun to make a batch using the in-game ingredients as a guide.

🥩 A Friend Who Went to Jail for Not Saying Hi

Once, a friend I'd gotten close to in-game saw me but didn't say hi.
So I joked that "it's illegal to run into 곤류 and not say hi."

We even staged a jail scene, and my friend posted a screenshot of them greeting my character to ask for their release.
I told them to wait for a special Liberation Day pardon, and while they waited,
they asked me to make them steak with cream sauce for dinner.

In Mabinogi Mobile, steak with cream sauce is made with meat, heavy cream, garlic, and pepper.
They probably meant the in-game food item, but I cooked the real thing and posted a photo.
I remember them seeing the photo and asking, surprised, if I'd actually made it.

🍫 Someday, I'll Make It Just Like in the Game!

Sometimes I'll browse the cooking list and spot a dish with a name or picture so tempting that I want to try it in real life.
The dishes use ingredients you'd cook with in real life, too, so imagining how they'd taste is part of the fun.

So far, I've only gone as far as giving people cookies inspired by the game
or making steak with cream sauce as part of a joke with a friend,
but when I get the chance, I'd like to give recreating the game's dishes a proper go.
I'd match the ingredients as closely as possible and even try to make the finished dish look like its in-game picture.

Of course, the game only lists ingredients, not actual recipes,
but wouldn't it be fun to make the food myself and find out how it tastes?
With Pepero Day coming up in November, baking cookies with chocolate in them to give as gifts sounds pretty good, too!