Fashionable Looks for When Your Cooking or Mountain Climbing

I approach the small Sheikah girl, standing over the cooking pot stationed just outside the produce shop. She is a tiny little thing too! Hunched over deep in thought, I speak to her. As I would have guessed, she’s trying to decide on some food to cook for her family.

 Koko’s Kitchen

Veggie Cream Soup is on the menu today! That’s what Koko tells me when I speak to her. The recipe calls for a Swift Carrot, Rock Salt, and Fresh Milk. Unfortunately, Koko is all out of Swift Carrots. I offer to bring her one, poor little thing. They sell them right here anyway, the sign for the produce shop is literally a carrot. Swift Carrots are only 16 rupees a piece, so I nab one and walk it back out to the little chef. She can smell it on me! Happily accepting the carrot, she quickly gets to work and a few moments later I’m being given a serving of the soup myself. Yum. That goes on the recipe sheet. Happy to have been able to cook for her little sister Cottla, I learnt that the poor thing is trying to step into the place of her departed mother. Aww. <3

Just...why?

 Cooking With Koko

She’s not finished though, there’s another quest, which means another recipe. This one is for a Hot Buttered Apple. This is a simple one, just need some Apples and some Goat Butter. She’s missing another ingredient - this time it’s the butter. After first verbally berating herself for not being as good as her mother, I reassure her I can get her some butter right away.

I head back inside and grab some, once from High Spirits Produce, slightly cheaper than the carrot was. Do you think you kill goats to get butter? That wouldn’t really make sense I guess. You didn’t get milk by killing cows in Ocarina. I head back out and hand it over, once again receiving some of the meal myself.

Koko Cuisine

Another one? I mean I’m already here, why not. This time we are making a Tough Meat-Stuffed Pumpkin. We need a Fortified Pumpkin and Raw Meat. I have both of those things! Koko is of course missing something - the Raw Meat, and goes through her motions of calling herself horrible. It’s actually a little concerning, like, what is her home life like? She talks about how her father used to go hunting, and I let her know I already have some Raw Meat on me. No hunting required. I can’t say I really WANT to eat a meat-stuffed pumpkin, but I’m happy to accept it nonetheless.

Koko’s Specialty

Aww...Nope still don't want kids.

One last cooking segment, Koko, then I gotta go. The last thing we are making is a desert. A Honeyed Apple. I guess that is different then a Buttered Apple but both sound pretty boring. It was her mother’s favorite (uh-oh). She needs Apples, which she has, and Courser Bee Honey, which she doesn’t. I do though, and I hand some over. Hopefully she can learn to stop putting so much pressure on herself. She’s like ten, tops. She does seem to be happy, content that she was able to replicate her mother’s recipes. She even wants to be a chef now, and come up with her own recipes! That’s great!

But seriously, what is her dad like?

With no one else needing my assistance with their problems, or at least not problems I can help them with, I figure it’s finally time to get out of town. There are no new additions to the Journal of Various Worries, but Paya did update her journal to mention me. She’s smitten.

I go back to the armor shop, Enchanted, and purchased the full set of stealth armor, and the hood I was missing from my Hylian Armor set as well. I had to sell off a good chunk of the precious stones I had gathered so far, but I’m not going to be using them for anything else right now, unlike the stealth suit.

It looks interesting on Link, to say the least. I am particularly fond of the chopsticks in his hair. Though I didn’t think Link really had all that much hair to really NEED that. I guess it did grow a little while he was unconscious for 100 years. I run back to Cortera and get my pieces all upgraded. The armor rating on the stealth gear isn’t very high, so I’ll stick to the Hylian clothes for now.

Yeah, there's definitely something up there.

With that done, before I leave I’m going to give one last thing a look - the mountains around the town. Starting with this particularly tall one just behind the fairy fountain. You ever just get a feeling about something in a video game, like when you see some place off in the distance and just think “there’s probably something there.” Well there’s no way there isn’t something at the top of that mountain. It does unnamed on my map, but the area just to the south of it is called Bonooru’s Stand.

Bonooru’s Stand

Might as well explore the area while I’m up here. It’s a large grassy plain with a few mountain tops. I come across a couple of mountain goats, one of which tries to knock me down. Ass. I check the top of the two smaller mountains and find nothing of particular interest. Time to try scaling the big one.

Gorgeous (Guess what's under that rock)

Another goat, but still no enemies. Bokoblins must not like heights much. I’m on the very edge of the map, or at least the part of the map that is filled in, so I don’t bother going in that direction. I walk around the base of the mountain top, looking for a good spot to scale. I find that the northern side seems to have the most slope to it, because frankly I’m not sure I have the stamina to get to the top.

I almost don’t make it, but luckily I picked the side of the mountain with the most gaps. I’m able to stop and rest a couple of times and regain my stamina without having to climb back down. I finally manage to reach the top, pulling myself up just as my stamina was going to go. Phew. And it looks like my feeling was right - there’s a rock up here, and we all know what’s under that rock!

A PONY!!!! (Nah, just a Korok.)

With that done, I head back down towards the fairy fountain. Instead of climbing back down the path to the town, I take a leap from a cliff above the shrine, floating across the gap on the opposite mountainside. I climb up, towards a ledge placed seemingly so I can regain my stamina. I climb all the way up without an issue.

I'd play an entire game of just this.

There are mountains on every side of Kakariko, each dotting with hilltops just screaming to be explored. At the top of the first one I find more ingredients. Plenty of bugs and flowers litter the landscape. As I get closer to Impa's house, I can see the small lake, Lantern Lake, that feeds into the waterfalls behind her home.

Lantern Lake

Just behind Lantern Lake is another, very tall hill. Because of the placement of the lake, there’s no easy way to climb up from the base, so that means using the paraglider again. Only this time, there’s no cliff to regain my stamina. I manage to find a few spots where I can “run” for a few moments, regaining a piece of the stamina wheel, but I still only just make it to the top. Up here, I find another of the frog statues from the town, facing a sword in a stone. It’s another Sheikah Eightfold Blade, the second one of these I’ve gotten and they’re pretty strong. I mark this area on my map, good thing to remember if I need a decent weapon.

I turn and survey the landscape. Hyrule castle looks beautiful and ominus from here. As I turn around, I spot something on the top of the hill at the center of Lantern Lake. Possibly a chest? I make an easy landing with the paraglider, and I find a Silent Shroom, Blue Nightshade, and a chest buried in the ground. There’s a lot of these ingredients around here, things that increase your stealth.. Now that I think about it, it’s probably there because of how stealthy the Sheikah are. Ninjas. Maybe the game is saying they use a lot of these in their food?

I hate everything.

I activate Magnesis and pull the chest from the ground...where it immediately rolls down the hill and into the lake behind Impa’s house. *sigh* I float down and land on Impa’s deck. Magnesis reveals the fallen chest, and an additional one in the water. But they’re too far, and I end up needing to use Cryonis to get close enough to pull them up. It’s annoying. But worth it. One of the chests has another Phrenic Bow, which have a zoom sight on them, and an Eightfold Longblade, a two handed version of the Eightfold Blade. As the name says, it’s longer.

With nothing left to do (I am NOT climbing back up those mountains right now…) I hop onto Fabio and lead him out of town. We meander through the valley on our way back to the stable. He isn’t leaving the path anymore, so I’d say I finally have this guy fully trained. As we pass the now solved Korok puzzle and a small waterfall, I make a mental to-do list. Obviously the big thing I need to do is head to Hateno like Impa asked. I’ll get more info and I can get my slate fixed too. There’s also still the matter of the giant skeleton monster to fight, and even before him there was the rock monster on the Great Plateau.

Maybe it’s time to do a little house cleaning.

---

Heart Containers: 5
Shrines Completed: 8
Koroks Found: 19
Meals: Cooked
Childhood Trauma: Resolved(?)
Stealth Armor: Purchased