My suggestion is about reworking cooking system into system which grants more player control over recipe result. Now we get a lot of possible outputs from standard recipes, but this results fully depends on some random generator Jorbtar did. Instead of randomizing, resulting FEP should straightly depends on ingredients used. For ex:
Steak & Tubers recipe:
Meat, 2 tubers, onion
Resulting FEP
2 +1 - variable, depends on meat
2 +1 - variable, depends on tubers
2 +1 - variable, depends on onion
Each ingredient replaces corresponding FEP and, possibly, buffs it with some value(bear meat makes it +2 str and buffs for 1,5, chicken makes it dex FEP and debufs for 0,9).
And if we will make S&T from bear(x1,5 +2 str), carrots(1,0 dex +1) and red onion(1,0 cha +1) it will become:
3 str+2
2 dex+1
2 cha+1
Or from Chicken(0,9 dex +1), carrots(1,0 dex +1) and yellow onion(1,0 con+1):
3,8 dex +1(2 from carrots, 1,8 from chicken)
2 con+1
Jorbtar can made independent table for food ingredients stats for each recipe, with different coeffs, but it will be more straight and understandable then current system which involves us to play in excel games with huge tables.
Some recipes can have few constant FEPs, few ingredient dependent(all bakery), or even all constant.
(All numbers only for an example)